EndNote 21 guide

When writing your paper, you may need to make modifications to the citations. You can do this within Word, but there is a right and wrong way to do it. If you edit a citation by changing the text directly in the document, your changes will disappear when the bibliography reformats.

The correct method for editing citations

You must use EndNote's "Edit & Manage Citation(s)" function to edit citations that have already been added to your document.

To edit your citations:

1. In Word, click on the citation (either the in-text or footnote citation) so that it is highlighted
2. From the EndNote tab in Word, select "Edit & Manage Citation(s)". The Edit & Manage Citations dialogue box will open
3. From the Edit Citation tab:
   • Select the drop-down menu beside "Formatting"
   • Choose the formatting you want (e.g., Exclude Author)
   • Add prefixes, suffixes or page numbers as required
4. Click "OK".

Alternatively:

1. Select/highlight the reference in Word
2. Right click on the reference
3. Hover over the "Edit Citation/s" menu option and select the relevant editing option.

Example scenario

You have inserted references from EndNote into your document using the APA referencing style, which is an author-date style. Your sentence currently reads:

Thiele (Thiele, 2019), in her analytical piece, offers an alternative hypothesis to the commonly held....

You wish to incorporate the author's name into the sentence of your text, so the name is not repeated. You follow the steps above to edit the citation using the "Edit & Manage Citations" function, choosing the "Exclude author" option. Your text now reads:

Thiele (2019) in her analytical piece, offers an alternative hypothesis to the commonly held....

Editing the citation correctly will allow Word to retain your selected formatting, even when other changes are made to the citations and bibliography.

As with editing citations, you should not delete citations directly from your document. If you do, the citation will appear again when the bibliography reformats. Instead, you must use Edit & Manage Citation(s).

The correct method for deleting citations

To delete a citation:

1. In Word, click on the citation (either the in-text or footnote citation) so that it is highlighted
2. From the EndNote tab in Word, select "Edit & Manage Citation(s)". The Edit & Manage Citations dialogue box will open
3. Select the "Edit Reference" drop-down arrow next to the reference you wish to delete
4. Select "Remove Citation"
5. Click "OK".

If you do not cite the reference anywhere else in your paper, the entry will also be removed from your bibliography or reference list.

To edit your bibliography/reference list:

• Click the "Configure bibliography"  icon in the box directly to the right of the "Bibliography" section of the Endnote tab
• Select the "Layout tab"
• From this tab, you can choose to:
  • Change font and font size
  • Add or change a title (ie. ‘Bibliography’ or ‘Reference List’)
  • Adjust indents and other formatting settings

Note: To change the text of the bibliography/reference list (eg. capitalisations), you will need to make the necessary edits within EndNote. See the "Edit citations" section of this guide for more information: