Styles in EndNoteDesktop and Word
EndNote desktop. To select a citation style in EndNotedesktop, select the style in the list of styles at the top left of EndNote. If the needed style is not showing in the list, click Select Another Style in the list and a Choose a Style window will display with a list of all styles presently installed with EndNote on your computer. Click the style you need and click the Choose button. If the needed style is not in the list, see the next section, "Adding a Style".
Some options: you can sort the list of styles in the Choose a Style window by either the name of the style or by its Category (usually a subject discipline) by clicking on the Name or Category labels at the top of the listing. Click into the list and depending on how the list is sorted, you can type the first letter (or quickly type the first few letters) and EndNote will display that part of the list. (If the list is sorted by Name, EndNote will use the Name ordering; if sorted by Category, the Category ordering.) If you click the Style Info/Preview button, you can see how the selected style cites a few example references. This can be helpful if you need to choose a style with certain attributes (for example, a style that is numbered and that italicizes the journal title) or if you are looking for a style that is like another style (trying to find one that is more completely defined).
Word. The list of styles available in Word is the same as what is available in EndNote. To add a new style in Word, you would add the style in EndNote. To select a style in Word, click the EndNoteribbon in Word and then click the Style list in the ribbon. You can simply select a style from the list and Word will reformat all EndNote citations in the current document in the newly selected style. If the style you need is not in the list, click Select Another Style. You can navigate this window with some of the same options as in EndNote desktop's Choose a Style window (described above). Click the needed style and then click the OK button. If the needed style is not included in the list, you can add the needed style to EndNote desktop (see the information in the next section, Adding a Style).
Adding a Style
If you need to add a new style to EndNote desktop, go to the EndNote website ,click the Downloads menu, scroll down to Output styles and click Add output styles. Search for the citation style using the style name or the journal name (or using the other search options). If you find the style, click the style name and then click the Download this style button. The browser should download the style. Next double-click the downloaded file and EndNote should open the style in an EndNote style window. To add the style to your EndNote styles, click File + Save as. If you do not have the style yet, you can delete the word Copy in the style name. After that, the style should be findable in EndNote or Word's list of styles.
Viewing/Editing a Style
To view or edit a style in EndNote, click Edit + point at Output Styles. Two options listed here are editing the currently selected style or Open Style Manager where you can select any of the installed styles. For an example to see more of these details, select the option to edit the currently selected style. This opens the style editing window. The window has a table of contents type column to the left with many elements of the style that are accessible from the table of contents. The top section of the table of contents includes general settings for the style; the Citations section has settings for how the in-text citations will be formatted; the Bibliography (or Footnotes) section has settings for how the references will be formatted.
One very important section is Bibliography (or Footnotes) Templates. Click Templates under Bibliography. Each template defines how EndNote will create references for items of that template's Reference Type (for example, the Book Reference Type or the Journal Article Reference Type). Styles vary significantly in how many reference types are defined in EndNote's version of the style. If you are citing a Reference Type that is not defined in the selected style (for example, perhaps a Patent), EndNote will use the Generic Reference Type (which will probably not be entirely correct). If you click the Reference Types button at the top of the window, you can see a list of all possible Reference Types with check-marks indicating the ones that are defined in that style. A further comment about EndNote's version of a citation style. I have been told by EndNote technical support that employees from their company take the instructions to authors from journal websites to create the style in EndNote. If the instructions to the author only give a few examples of types of references, the EndNote style is likely to also have few templates defined. Some strategies for dealing with this are: 1) if possible, choose a citation style that has more reference types defined; 2) if a citation style is based on another style (for example, a given journal's style being based on the Chicago Manual of Style) it may be possible to add templates from the original style (though changes may be required); 3) it may be possible to edit a template from another style by reference to citations in journal articles from the journal (it may be easy to make mistakes editing the templates because of the special characters in the templates!); 4) EndNote support can help (their contact information is on the EndNote.com website).
You can click Reference Types and then select a Reference Type that is not yet defined and EndNote will add that Reference Type to the list of templates. However, the template details still have to be created. Most of the information in the template appears to be the names of fields in the EndNote reference data. When citing a reference, where a field name appears in the template, EndNotewill put the data that is in that field (so, where the template says Author, EndNote will put the data from the Author field). Most of the punctuation in the template is also used as punctuation in the resulting citations (it is just copied into the citation). There are a few special characters in the templates that have a special meaning:the straight line (forced separation), a diamond symbol (link adjacent text), single backquotes (used for actually displaying text that happens to be a field name, such as DOI), and up arrows (that are used to offer alternate versions of singular and plural terms). Many of these items can be selected from the Insert Field button at the top right of the style editing window.
For much more information, see the EndNote Style Editing Guide . (On that screen there are links for the Windows and Mac PDFsbeneath the video.) Be sure to check the last section, "An Easier Way: Editing Existing Styles" which begins "A far easier way to create an EndNote Style is to edit a style that already exists and save it with a new name." Also helpful is a table beginning on page 37 about the special characters used in creating the templates for reference types.
Accuracy of EndNote's citations
There are several contributing factors that result in the citations being accurate or not. Among these are: EndNote has around 6,000 styles. Only about 500 are typically installed, however, it is easy to add styles. EndNote creates these style files (files that the program uses to format citations in the different citation styles) from the instructions to authors on journal and style organization (such as APA) sites. I am more confident of this point in regard to particular journal’s citation styles. I’m not sure if the entire APA style as implemented in EndNote is based on instruction to authors. EndNote may well have referred to that style’s published manual. Very often, journals' instructions to authors will only give a few types of citations, maybe books, journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, and websites. If that is all the journal shows a definition for, that’s what EndNote will include in their file. And when a reference that you are citing has a reference type (for example, Thesis) that happens to not be defined in the style that you are using, then EndNote will format the citation using its Generic reference type.So, it can be important when working with a new style to see how thoroughly it is defined and in particular to see whether all of the reference types you are citing are defined in the style. And I think it is also important to review the citations in Word to see that things are being cited as expected. It’s likely that if one uses a well-established and often-used style such as APA that some level of confidence will develop. Some of the other factors for inaccurate citations include wrong data in adatabase. This might be more likely in Google Scholar since editors do not check the data, however, any database could have wrong data. Another possibility of error is in the data transfer because there is an assignment of a given database field to an EndNote field. Typically these details do not result in an abundance of inaccuracies, however, I would not expect no errors in the citations. There is certainly variation between the databases (one EBSCO database was including author’s emails with author’s names in the author name field for a while because EBSCO obtained the data from the data provider that way—however that is not the usual case) and variation between the citation styles (especially individual journal styles). One other significant source of inaccurate citations is that there could be an error in the template in a citation style that tells EndNote how to format a citation for a given reference type. These templates have two specific characters (for "forced separation" and "link adjacent text") that perform a certain function in the citations and are intended to cause citations to format as well as possible when there is some missing data (such as no journal issue number). If you see a case where EndNote is incorrectly formatting a citation and the template for the reference type is defined in EndNote's style file, you may want to contact EndNote technical support (or me). They can route the request to colleagues who can edit their citation stylefile.
