Fixing broken/corrupted EndNote citations

Uh oh! EndNote citations that look active, but some have stopped responding to EndNote at all? Won’t format into a new style nor appear in the references and won’t convert into unformatted citations? But if you view field codes, they look okay? Mysterious and frustrating?

I think this is caused by editing on other word processors, but I’m also suspicious of Track Changes and the copy & pasting of formatted citations.

Solution? There doesn’t seem to be any way to fix these broken citations directly. Best straightforward(ish) option: unformat citations, remove field codes from the document (turning the broken ones into plain text), then go through and reinsert them from EndNote manually.

If you’d been using an author-date style, you can automate this slightly by changing EndNote’s temporary citation delimiters to round brackets, meaning EndNote will go through and pick up on all the defunct citations. However, it’ll also pick up on anything else in a bracket, plus it won’t match the citations directly with the EndNote library (et als, no record numbers), so you’ll need to select & insert each citation.

Not ideal! What if you’ve got loads of these corrupted citations? And you’ve got loads of other stuff in brackets and/or you’ve used a numbered style?

THERE IS SOMETHING THAT CAN BE DONE.

This is it:

Convert all still-functional citations to unformatted citations.

Press Alt+F9 (display field codes in the document) and you should see the broken citations as field codes, including a load of data about the reference – this is what can be used.

Press Alt+F9 to switch back. Unfortunately getting the actual text of the field codes is not straightforward. But someone has made something that will do it:

http://www.gmayor.com/export_field.htm

(I can’t guarantee that this isn’t some kind of cunning virus thing, but I’m fairly confident that that’s not the case.)

Once you’ve downloaded it, then installed it, you can access it from the ‘Developer’ tab in Word.

Go through the document, highlighting it and running the converter in chunks (I think it can only process a certain amount of text at a time). (Also: avoiding headings and other non-standard text, as it’ll clear the formatting).

So, your broken EndNote citations will now be weird long field code text. But you can modify them (with Word’s Find/Replace function – Ctrl+H) so that EndNote thinks they’re unformatted citations!

Semi-colons in multiple citations are a hurdle and a few of these Find/Replaces are for dealing with them. The others are designed to clean up at least the start of each field code so EndNote will pick them up.

Find/Replace these, in this order (if ‘?’ is used, activate wildcards for that search, otherwise don’t)

19??; WITH ~CHECK DATE~

20??; WITH ~CHECK DATE~

</Cite><Cite><Author> WITH }{

ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author> WITH NOTHING

</Author><Year> WITH COMMA SPACE

</Year><RecNum> WITH SPACE HASH

</RecNum> WITH @@

&???;  WITH NOTHING

&apos; WITH NOTHING

{ADDIN EN.CITE.DATA} WITH ~BROKEN CITATION~

 

(That last one is for totally unrecoverable ones that don’t have full field code data – they’ll need to be searched for later and reinserted manually.)

Then ‘Update Citations & Bibliography’ and cross your fingers.