For some referencing styles, author initials are supposed to appear in in-text citations when you have multiple authors with the same family name. Most times the problem is multiple variations of a single author name. For example, if one author’s name is entered as "Williams, S J" in one reference in your EndNote library, as Williams, Susan Jennifer in a second reference, and as "Williams, Susan J" in a third reference, EndNote will treat them as three different authors. You will start to see variations such as S Williams and S J Williams in your in-text citations. It is not an EndNote error. It is a data entry error.
You can end up with multiple versions of a single author's name because each database has different ways of dealing with author names in its records. Authors may also use different versions of their name for different publications. You will need to clean up your records to fix the issue.
There are 3 parts to this process:
The first step is to edit your Author Terms List to remove unwanted versions of the name, e.g. you would delete Williams, S J and Williams, Susan J. Williams, Susan Jennifer is the most complete version of the name, so that is the one to keep. If you later add a paper by Williams, Susan Jemima to you library, having full names for both authors will enable EndNote to distinguish between Susan Jennifer Williams and Susan Jemima Williams
Now that your Author Terms List is clean. The individual records need to be edited to ensure that each entry for the same author is consistently formatted. If you have the Reference Panel open on the right or at the bottom, it will speed this process up. The deleted versions of author names will appear in red in the EndNote record. This makes them easy to spot for editing.
If tidying up all of the author names in your Author Terms List and individual records doesn't fix this issue, and you do not want any initials in the citations in your document, you can edit the output style to turn off this feature.
You can modify the citation templates of any style to use superscript numbers for in-text citations. If you are already using a numbered style, you only need to modify the Citation template. For other styles, edit both the Citation template and the Bibliography layout. Choose the style you need for your reference list. For these examples, I’ve used harvard-cqu.
EndNote creates Terms lists, thesauri, of author names, keywords and journal titles from what you enter into these fields in your references. These lists can be edited.
Some referencing styles require the abbreviated journal title instead of the full journal title. EndNote’s Journals Term lists helps with this. The full journal title still goes into the Journal Title field of the record for the journal article. When you insert your citation, EndNote finds the abbreviation in the term list and uses it in the reference when the referencing style requires it.
To show abbreviated journal titles in your reference list / bibliography, you will need to replace the existing Journals list with one of the supplied journal abbreviation lists.
For further information open Help in your EndNote library and read the chapters about term lists.
When you convert a copy of your document to plain text for submission or review, it keeps the Word formatting, but removes the active links between your EndNote library and the in-text citations and bibliography in your document. EndNote is longer be able to recognise the citations it originally inserted for you when the document was actively linked to it. If you insert new citations into this plain text version, EndNote will start creating a new reference list at the very end of that document. This is how you can end up with 2 reference lists.
This issue is most often a result of working in the plain text version of a document you sent to your supervisor for review.
When you receive the feedback from your supervisor, you'll need to have 2 documents open.
This way you will only have one reference list and you will avoid any issues with the Review comments formatting in Word clashing with the EndNote formatting.
It will also help to name your files clearly and consistently to avoid this kind of confusion. For example, you could put ForReview on the end of the file name.
You have 2 placement options for Figures inserted from your EndNote library.
The referencing style you have chosen may have been set up to create a List of Figures at the end of your document. If you want your figures to appear in text, but your diagram or picture is nowhere to be seen near the in-text citation, you will need to edit the style. A figure citation looks like (Figure 1) for example.
What you see in your Word document is different from what EndNote sees. EndNote is only reading its own formatting code. For example, when you see (Martin, 2018), EndNote is seeing {Martin, 2018 #17}. This is the issue. It's very easy to fix.