Hi,
I'm helping a customer with a document using APA and some reference types are displaying references with double spaces. One example is the government document reference type. If there is no report number in the report number field the template seems to expect that field and to add a space before it. If we add a made-up report number the formatting is OK. Also, I found that I could change the space before (Report Number) to a diamond (Link Adjacent Text) and that then the double spaces don't appear, however, I had to then add a period after the title in the reference data in the EndNote liberary. (These strategies were not all entirely my own!)
Does anyone have recommendations for what to do in this kind of case. We were seeing problems of this type (the double spaces) with the following reference types: government document, hearing, electronic book, and web page.
These were my first try at writing the instructions for this as well as mention of an alternative.
I talked with EndNote technical support and I found that it appears that the way the APA style is represented in EndNote, it seems to be expecting certain of the data fields—for example, the record number field in a government document. So, if that data is not in the reference, it results in there being an extra space. Technical support showed me how to avoid the space, however, it will require a little editing of the style.
In case I don’t hear from you today, let me mention what these changes are.
First we go to EndNote + Edit menu + Output styles and then edit the style you are using.
Under Bibliography click Templates
and for example, view the Government Document reference type
The template originally had Author (Year)| Title|. (Report Number).| at the start (I may not be including some of the punctuation)
The change we made was changing the space in front of (Report Number) to a diamond
Now, the space is represented in the template by a dot midway within the line (so sort of parallel with the middle of the R).
We want to replace that dot with a diamond which is added by clicking the Insert Field button at the top right of the style editing window (same window as shows the templates) and then clicking “Link Adjacent Text” near the top of the list
One way to do that is to click right after the dot before (Report Number) and before the first parenthesis, then add the diamond (using Link Adjacent Text) and then backspace the dot.
Then the problem is that EndNote doesn’t automatically add the period after the title, so in the record for the reference that was not displaying correctly, add a period after the title in the record in the EndNote library.
When we went through these steps, it worked for the reference I was working with and didn’t seem to cause the other government document references to be affected (though I did not check all). Technical support thought that the method would work.
Another option is to remove codes in the Word document and then to directly edit the document and remove extra spaces that way. If you do that, it is strongly recommended that you make sure you have a copy of the most recent version of the document with codes as well as the copy with the codes removed that you then edit. Then if you do have to do any more work with the document with EndNote, at least you have the most recent version possible, though you’d have to do all the additional editing steps again (such as removing the extra spaces). There is a built-in way in EndNote to do this, however, technical support mentioned to me that there is another way to remove the codes that may be useful. The built-in way can conflict with Word templates (such as the Thesis Office’s Thesis template) and advanced formatting in Word. The other way may not conflict in the same way or at all. The steps of the other way to remove codes are
Save the document with EndNote codes
Save as a second version (to be used to remove codes on the second version)
In the second version press Ctrl + A (this selects all the document, highlights it)
Then press Ctrl + 6
That document should allow direct editing, however, EndNote cannot be used with the document after codes have been removed.
Have a nice day
John