Bracket Bother

Sometimes, you just need to put things in brackets: perhaps a note to yourself to add an argument, or finesse a point, or, perhaps simply, an aside to the reader. In the latter case, of course, round brackets (like this) are the norm, so for others you might wish to use a different shape of brackets.

When you do this, you can have some odd, and annoying, things happen when you use Endnote.

Say, for example you had the following text:

This is one example of bracket failure {it is not fatal but annoying}. This can be referenced

You then insert a reference from your library. It is quite possible that you will get a dialog box looking like this:

Endnote is asking you to track down the reference which is in the curly brackets ‘{…}’. Of course, it does not exist, because it is not an Endnote reference.

If you have only a few of these, you can just click through and ignore them. But if you are using Endnote intensively, it can get frustration that, every once in a while, Endnote will prompt you for this.

What is happening is that Endnote is looking for the particular combination of delimiters which tell it where citations are to be found. In this case it is the pair of curly brackets.

You can change the settings of Endnote to use different delimiters. You need to click on the small arrowed box on the Bibliography group on the Endnote tab.

This will bring up the Format bibliography dialog.

In the middle of top tab are the temporary citation delimiters. You can change these (preferably before you start writing!) to avoid using the same bracket type which you use for your notes and comments.

For example, if you want to use curly brackets for your note, change the delimiters to square brackets ‘[…]’. As long as you are consistent in your usage, Endnote should stop asking you to identify references for what are your writing notes.

Invalid Class String

Occasionally, you get error messages from Endnote.

Unfortunately they are sometimes less than informative.

A case in point is when you get an error message saying ‘Invalid Class String’.

There are a few possibilities here:

You may be running Word and Endnote at different levels of permissions (e.g. Word as Administrator and Endnote as a user). This seems to confuse matters.

You may be running a different version of Endnote to that installed as the cite while you write tools in Word. The answer here is to reinstall the tools in the correct version.

Fixes, depending on your versions of Word and Endnote, can be found here:

http://www.endnote.com/support/faqs/CWYW/faq13.asp

Endnote Training Videos on You Tube

Just to draw your attention to the Endnote You Tube channel:

http://www.youtube.com/endnotetraining

This contains over 50 videos of Endnote training, including quick start lessons, downloading from databases and some more obscure bits like the importance of the .DATA folder.

The only problem I can see with them is that some are a little out of date, like the JSTOR video. JSTOR changed their interface recently; this is the problem with this sort of documentation: it goes out of date quite rapidly.

Still, worth a look, and they are nice, and useful, videos.

Displaying Multiple Authors

You may have found that later versions of Endnote (X5 in particular) displays by default all the authors of a multi-author reference.

You may find this slightly annoying, as I do, because the column in the display is too narrow and so the additional information is wasted.

Furthermore, the initials of the authors are displayed, and this can be inconsistent in the references. In extreme cases you can get one author with last name then initials displayed, and then the next reference has last name and full first names. This looks a bit confusing, in my view.

There is a fairly easy fix for this one, found on Edit | Preferences and choose the Display Fields link.

Click on the checkbox at the bottom to switch off the all author display. Click Apply and OK, and the display should look neater.

Importing PDFs

It is possibly a little known fact, but you can import PDFs into you Endnote library and, in some cases, Endnote can get the bibliographical detail from the headers in the PDF.

It has to be said that this will only work with reasonably recent PDFs.

To import, choose File | Import | File from Endnote.

The Import File dialog is shown.

Click on Choose… to select the PDF of interest, and make sure you have PDF selected in the Import Option drop down menu.

Click on Import.

A number of windows might appear as Endnote imports and analyses the file. The item should then appear in your Imported References group, with the PDF attached.