If you are writing a long document e.g. a book or thesis, create a separate Word document for each chapter. In each chapter, insert your citations to link them to references in your EndNote library. You should keep the chapters separate until the latest moment before merging them to create a document with a single bibliography.
Open each chapter, go to the EndNote tab, click Convert Citations and Bibliography, select Convert to Unformat Citations. This will unformat all the citations in the document. The bibliography at the end will disappear and the in-text citations will look like this (Author Date example): {Pratt, 1995 #10} which is a place-holder for your reference which can be reformatted at any time.
Create a new blank word document.
Highlight all the text in the chapter (ctrl-A), copy (ctrl-C) and paste into the new document .
Continue copying and pasting each chapter at the end of the previous document, until all chapters are in one document
Reformat the new document - go to the EndNote tap, click on Update Citations and Bibliography. EndNote will format all the citations from the combined document and create a single bibliography.
Save your document!
General Tips for using Long Documents and Endnote
USE A TEMPLATE: Set up a template with your chosen heading sizes, margins, fonts etc and use this for all documents and sub-documents.
WORK WITH A SET OF DOCUMENTS, one for each constituent part of the major work. Give these documents consistent names eg. chapter1.docx. Use a sub-document for each chapter. Do not try to merge them into one large document or a Master Document until all chapters are complete.
SAVE ALL DOCUMENTS in the same folder.
BACKUP the individual chapters frequently, and on as many different computers /drives/Dropbox etc as possible. (3 different places is recommended).
USING THE GROUPS feature of EndNote may be useful if you want to keep track of the citations you are using for the various chapters. You can create a group for each chapter and copy the references into them.
MAKE USE of the NOTES and RESEARCH NOTES fields. They can each take up to 16 pages of text, allowing you to make extensive analytical notes about a reference, copy quotes and pages numbers.
You may use the Cite While You Write function When inserting references into your subdocuments (chapters) from EndNote but you will need to unformat all of your sub-documents before integrating them into a large document or Master Document.
IF YOU FREQUENTLY CUT AND PASTE CHUNKS OF TEXT, write your thesis with the instant formatting turned off. You will then have no EndNote field codes attached to your document, which may prevent document corruption.
The same applies to Headers and Footers and page numbers – you can insert them while working in the sub-documents, but they will need to be removed before the final integration.
This video tutorial above from the University of Queensland Library (CC BY) demonstrates the more advanced functions of EndNote that may be useful when writing long documents. This includes, editing styles, using journal term lists, and merging multiple chapters. Combining (or merging) chapters into one document commences at timepoint 27:32.
Using EndNote to manage PRISMA flowcharts for systematic reviews
James Cook University (JCU) Library has created excellent resources for using EndNote to manage the PRISMA flowchart. You can find these resources here.
