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In a previous post, I mentioned a document that I had edited that used EndNote, which, the authors had confidently reassured me, meant that the references would cause me no problems, and it turned out, to no one's surprise, that a few issues had cropped up. This post describes one of the issues – and it was one that I hadn't anticipated. I was lucky because the document used an author, date referencing system. Otherwise, it's possible that I might not even have noticed there was a problem. Here's how I discovered the problemI was quite a long way through editing the document when I came across a reference citations that had "et al." in italic where roman was used in other citations. I've mocked up a paragraph below so that you can see what text might have looked like:  I switched over to look at the EndNote library so that I could check that all the data fields had been correctly filled in, but the reference wasn't in the library.
The citation had been entered using Zotero – another reference management system! This was obvious looking at the field code (truncated in the image below):  This made me think – if there hadn't been a discrepancy in how the citation had been displayed, would I even have noticed the problem? In a document with plain-text references, checking that each citation has a corresponding reference in the reference list is a standard copy-editing task, but in a document that has been referenced with EndNote, I tend to assume that all the citations will be referenced in the bibliography at the end of the document. What did I do about it?I decided to ask ChatGPT to write a macro for me to detect what reference manager systems had been used in the document. This turned out to be a reasonably simple request and after a couple of iterations, I've ended up with a macro that summarizes which reference managers have been used in the document and uses different coloured font for citations added with different systems.
Using different coloured font for the citations meant that it was easy to spot which references needed to be updated:  The macro may well not be perfect – my macro programing skills are limited so it's difficult for me to check it other than by using it on different documents – but it does seem to work, so, if you think it might be useful, you can find it here. Use this macro to reset the citation text colour. Let me know if this referency system detection macro works for you!
For other EndNote tips, see: Using EndNote to style references in documents that don't use EndNote What you need to edit documents that use EndNote What to watch out for when you're editing with EndNote Using abbreviations for journal names in EndNote
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AuthorAndrea at Yours Truleigh Editing Archives
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