Situation: you have a Word document that has no ‘live’ EndNote references in it – they were either typed manually or if EndNote or other referencing software was used, then the live references have been converted to plain text at some point and you do not have an earlier version of the document where they’re live.
This might also be useful if you’ve got a document with live references in from different referencing software that doesn’t have ‘unformatted citations’.
You have an EndNote library of the references that are used in the document (or, perhaps, you don’t yet, but you would like to get this too – see note at the end); you just want to link the EndNote library to the citations in the document.
I.e.: you have a Word document with plain text references and you want to make them live EndNote references.
HOW DO YOU DO IT?
First, if you have numbered citations, you don’t really have much to go on. You could probably do a Find and Replace to change them all to a general {Author, 1000} format, but literally that (i.e. not specific authors and years) – running the ‘Update Citations and Bibliography’ function would identify them as points where a citation is required but you’d need to then manually add the details of the reference to search and select the correct reference to add.
However, if you have some kind of author-date citations, you can convert (Smith, 2024) into {Smith, 2024} – meaning that the process will be at least partly automated.
If round brackets are not used at all in the rest of the document, other than in citations (this is unlikely unfortunately!), then simply use Find and Replace (ctrl-H) to replace ( with { then ) with }.
However, otherwise, some more complex Find & Replace functions may be necessary. In these cases, ensure ‘Use wildcards’ (in the Find and Replace box) is selected.
Find:
\((*, [0-9]{4})\)
Replace with:
{\1}
Is probably the simplest form, assuming a (Smith, 2024) format (i.e single author surname then comma, space, year – no initials or et al or other authors).
More complex:
Find:
\(([!0-9]@, )([!0-9]@, )([0-9]{4})\)
Replace with:
{\1\3}
Will convert (Smith, J., 2024) or (Smith, et al, 2024) or (Smith, J. et al, 2024) to {Smith, 2024}
Find:
\(([!0-9]@)( and [!0-9]@)(, [0-9]{4})\)
Replace with
{\1\3}
Will convert (Smith and Jones, 2023) to {Smith, 2023} (though you’d need to watch out for institutions with the word ‘and’ in their name)
I would always do ‘Replace’ one at a time, rather than ‘Replace All’ – those functions can end up doing weird things (due to the capacity to have flexible author strings with any number of characters), so it feels safer to check it hasn’t somehow selected a whole paragraph to replace. If you do have a mix of reference formats, I guess I’d maybe work through these in reverse order they’re listed here (ands first, then initials, et als, etc, then just all the simple one author names remaining) and I think that may work. You may need to tweak if you have other formats!
Once all the references are in the format {Smith, 2024}, hopefully, if you’re confident your EndNote library has the right references, then it should be relatively straightforward (though it will still involve some manual selecting) to ‘Update Citations and Bibliography’ and get everything linked up and functional.
IF YOU DON’T HAVE THE REFERENCES IN ENDNOTE: this is rather more work, but it is possible to automate this to some extent, if you’ve got a lot of journal references. The exact sequence of processing will depend on the reference format, but you’re aiming to convert e.g.
Smith, A., Jones, B. (2024) ‘Article about interesting things’. Journal of interesting things 123(45):67-68.
Into something like:
(smith*.au AND “article about interesting things”.ti)
That you can then compile into a long string and run as searches on a database.
It *is* possible, just arduous, so only worth it for large numbers (for middling numbers, just manually copying first author and titles (often minus punctuation is safer) into two columns in Excel. Then use an Excel function to put them all into the right format to search your chosen database (you may do this several different ways to do several different databases), copy that column into word and run and Find and Replace for a paragraph mark (which is ^p) to be replaced by ‘ AND ‘ and then you’ll have your search string.
ALTERNATIVELY, depending on format, it’s sometimes possible to actually set rules to split references up (Find and Replace in Word, looking for punctuation usually, replacing with tab-spaces) so that ALL the information can be pasted into Excel – then you can use the process to add references in Excel via a tab-delimited format into EndNote. This can be tough, but if your references are all of the same type and punctuated in distinctive ways, it is possible!