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EndNote Basic

A Cautionary Tale

While citation generators are a great time-saver, users still need to verify and check information in references in their accounts as well as in the final document. It is recommended that this be done in the MyEndnote Web program rather than after having used a citation in a document.

A suggested strategy is to leave citations in the Unfiled group until after having proofread them for accuracy; then file them into the appropriate group.

The following are known issues that users will need to verify and correct.

Title Capitalization Errors

Many of the databases use inconsistent title capitalization. Sometimes a title will be in all caps, other times with the first letter of each word word capitalized, and in some cases it will be in sentence case. In order for Endnote Web to format the title correctly for any citation style, verify that the title of the reference in your Endnote Web account is in sentence case, that is, with the first letter of the title capitalized as well as any proper nouns or acronyms.

Example: [article title] Common core standards for English language arts and literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects.

Newspaper Issue Dates

Proper citation of newspaper articles may require an issue date. During export, the issue date might not transfer to the Endnote Web record. Click the title of the imported reference, and verify that the reference is recognized as a newspaper article.

Example:  endnote newspaper article

Then scroll down to the "issue date" field, and enter the month (not abbreviated) and date. Do not enter the year.

Example:  endnote issue date

Corporate Authors

Put a comma after the name of an organization in your EndNote library in order for it to appear correctly in your reference list.

         Example: National Governors Association Center for Best Practices,

         Example: U.S. Department of Education,

 

Title Capitalization Tutorial

One common error when direct exporting from databases, is capitalization errors. View this video to correct one of the most common errors.