Endnotes! Help? Please?

May 18, 2008 3:41 PM

I'm writing a paper in Microsoft Word, and I want the endnotes to have each reference assigned one number throughout the whole document, instead of one each time I add an endnote. I really don't want to have to go through and number them manually. Any ideas?

I'm not using EndNote at the moment, and realise I probably should be. But it seems that I am now past the point of return.

posted by cholly to computers & internet (11 comments total)

I might be reading your question wrong, but what about in text references and then just a 'works cited' page at the end without any numbering? Something like this:

Text
A recent study showed the moon was in fact made of cheese (Jones, 2007)...

Work Cited page
Jones, S. (2007). The moon is made of cheese. Some Dubious Journal, 123, 691-699.
posted by Razzle Bathbone at 4:00 PM on May 18, 2008

I did think about that, but I'm trying to stick to the format that published papers in the field seem to follow and that is endnotes with one number assigned to each reference.
posted by cholly at 4:07 PM on May 18, 2008

Use a proper citation manager, such as Endnote or Reference Manager.
posted by nowonmai at 4:12 PM on May 18, 2008

Depending on how much work you have already done and how soon the paper is due, using a citation manager (even this late in the process) might be easiest.

Does your school subscribe to RefWorks? That would be free at least and has all the major and minor citation styles built into it.

The other option would be to create it manually. In the text itself you can add a superscript number and then create the endnote page with the numbers yourself. The command in Word I believe is pressing Ctrl+Shift+=(the equals key) all at the same time, then type your number. Just hit Ctrl+Shift+= again to go back to normal script.
posted by Razzle Bathbone at 4:23 PM on May 18, 2008

Assuming you mean that you want your references section to look like this:

[1] Aaronson, Aaron A. "Blah." Journal of Blah...
[2] Bee, Billy Bob. "Bleah." Bleah Quarterly...
[3] Cee, Charlene C. "Foo." American Foo Journal...

And for your paper to have cites to Aaronson [1] and Cee [3] and Cee again [3],

I'd bet that the easiest thing to do now is a variant of just doing it manually. The hard part will be that you won't know the numbers until you have all your sources. So just put in cites to Aaronson [AARONSON] and Cee [CEE] and do global search and replace when you're done.

Or just do it with text like Razzle said. If you weren't clearly and explicitly told to use a specific citation style or to follow the dominant citation style of the discipline, your prof should be obliged to accept any reasonable one. In which case, time spent figuring out how to make this work is wasted time.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 4:47 PM on May 18, 2008

Zotero, a Firefox extension, is a great citation manager, especially if you have a lot of electronic resources or access to pages that contain metadata about your sources (like an online catalog, or an electronic version of the newspaper or journal that you're citing). You can also easily add in citations manually if you need to. It can easily be integrated into Word or Open Office. It will be much less work using this, even if you manually enter every citation, than it will be to write the citations all by hand.
posted by k8lin at 5:21 PM on May 18, 2008

I should have been more specific: you can search the Library of Congress catalog, if you're citing a book, and import the citation information into Zotero for that book. This is easier than entering books manually into Zotero (which is still pretty simple). I usually only manually enter journal articles that I can't find in a Zotero-friendly database like EBSCO.
posted by k8lin at 5:25 PM on May 18, 2008

I have done this in MS Word. The first time you cite a reference, enter it as an endnote the way you have been doing. Every time after that, insert a "cross-reference" to the endnote. You will see a list of your endnote items and you can pick the one you want to reference.

Later if you insert new endnotes, so that they all get re-numbered, your cross-refs will re-number just like you expect.

I hope this is helpful, it seems remarkably hard to describe without a copy of MS Word running to refer to...
posted by secretseasons at 5:29 PM on May 18, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

PS there are also options to play around with for how you want the cross-ref formatted, to match the formatting of your other endnotes.
posted by secretseasons at 5:31 PM on May 18, 2008

secretseasons, that is exactly what I was looking for. I know it was possible, just couldn't work out the mechanics of it.

Thanks!

*makes note to self to learn how to use EndNote*
posted by cholly at 6:22 PM on May 18, 2008

Later if you insert new endnotes, so that they all get re-numbered, your cross-refs will re-number just like you expect.

This is not always true. If you want to make sure your cross-references renumber, you need to select them, right-click, and choose "update." If those are the only fields you're using or if the other fields you're using can be updated without harming the document, it's much easier: just select the whole document (ctrl-A) and press either F9 or alt-shift-U (assuming you haven't reassigned these keyboard shortcuts).
posted by Partial Law at 6:48 PM on May 18, 2008