Tips for EndNote: Authors' Names

EndNote has very particular rules about how to format authors' names so that they appear correctly in your in-text citations and reference lists.

Each author has to appear on a separate line in the Author field of the record, and *must* follow one of the following two patterns:

Smith, John
OR
John Smith

EndNote can take either of those patterns to make the name appear in the right format in your paper (you can use initials instead of the authors' given names).

This can get a little tricky if your author is a company or corporation (like, say, James Cook University Library) or a name like Dalai Lama or Dr. Seuss, which have to be kept in order rather than broken into the surname, initial pattern.

If you simply type James Cook University Library into the Author field, EndNote will put it in your in-text citations like this:  (Library, 2015).*  And it will put it in your reference list like this:

Library, J.C.U. (2012).

The secret is the comma.  EndNote assumes that everything in front of the comma is the author's surname, and everything after the comma must be given names.  If there is no comma, then EndNote assumes the last word in the string of words must be the surname and everything in front of that word must be the given names.

To fix this, put a comma at the end of the sequence of words that must stay together in order:

James Cook University Library,
Dalai Lama,

Then it will appear in your text as (James Cook University Library, 2015) or (Dalai Lama, 2015).

Now for the next tricky bit:  Using acronyms for in-text citations.

Click on image for a larger view
Say you have an author like the World Health Organisation, and you want to call them "WHO" in your in-text citations.  If you use EndNote, they will always appear as (World Health Organisation, 2015) when you insert the reference.

The way to get around that is to use the Edit and Manage Citations controls in Word.  For every instance where you want to replace the whole name with WHO, you need to exclude the author (this will stop the author's name from appearing in the reference) and put WHO in the Prefix field.  Make sure you put any necessary commas and spaces in the Prefix, otherwise they won't appear in your paper.


*If you are using APA 6th Style.

Comments

Anonymous said…
This was extremely useful. The example provided precisely described my problem and the solution worked perfectly. Thanks.