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related to the use of EndNote at Charles Sturt University.

Wednesday 15 October 2008

Corrupt Word document

The cite-while-you-write (CWYW) feature in EndNote makes referencing almost painless. But some users occasionally report that their cursor jumps to another section of the document when inserting or editing in-text citations, or formatting the bibliography. This problem may be caused by corrupt EndNote field codes in the document.

EndNote inserts hidden field codes in a Word document when you use the CWYW function, ie. when you insert an in-text citation, EndNote also includes information about the reference in hidden field codes. When you select a formatted in-text citation and use the
Edit Citation(s) tool to Remove the citation, all the data in the associated hidden field codes is removed. When you make wholesale changes to a document that includes EndNote references, eg. cutting and pasting multiple sections of text, you may leave behind some of the field code data, and hence corrupt the Word document.

The following procedure should clean up the field codes in your document:
  1. Make a backup of your document.
  2. Unformat the in-text citations:

Word 2007: Go to the EndNote Web tab and choose "Convert Citations and Bibliography > Convert to Unformatted Citations."

Word 2000/XP/2003: Go to the "Tools" Menu and choose "EndNote Web > Unformat Citations" command.

This will also remove the reference list.

  1. Select Ctrl+A on the keyboard to highlight everything.
  2. Select Ctrl+6 (above the "T" and "Y" key) to remove any additional hidden field codes.
  3. Select Ctrl+C to copy the highlighted text.
  4. Open a new document and use Ctrl+V to paste.

You should now be able to format and edit this cleaned up version of the document without encountering the previous problems.

Note: This procedure will also remove other field codes and some formatting used by Word.

Further information can be found at on the Thomson Reuters EndNote web site at http://www.endnoteweb.com/support/faqs/CWYW/faq9.asp

The CSU Library EndNote FAQs describe the use of formatted (include field codes) vs unformatted references in Word.