The University of Queensland

Every EndNote citation in your Word document includes a large number of field codes which you cannot see. The grey text that you can see when you click on a citation alerts you to the presence of the field codes. These field codes can easily become corrupted.

It is essential to use the EndNote Edit Citations command whenever you want to delete, move or merge citations. Use the Edit Citations command to delete the citations, and then reinsert them in the required position. Never use the delete or backspace keys to remove citations, and never cut and paste citations to move them to another position.

If the EndNote tools are still active in Word, but EndNote is no longer formatting the citations correctly, then the document has probably become corrupted. The best solution seems to be to unformat the citations and remove any field codes, and then copy and paste the text into a new document, which you can then format. See the FAQ on cleaning up field codes on the EndNote website.

When following the instructions in that FAQ, note the following points. After you have pasted the unformatted text into a new document, you will have to use the EndNote Update Citations and Bibliography command (or the Format Bibliography command in earlier versions of Word).

That command will format your references again, but it does not turn on the instant formatting. To get the instant formatting working again, you must go to the Instant Formatting tab in the bibliography preferences. In Word 2007, you access the bibliography preferences from the small arrow at the bottom of the Bibliography group in the EndNote tools. In earlier versions of Word, just click on the EndNote Format Bibliography command in Word, and look for the Instant Formatting tab.