The University of Queensland

There are occasions when you will want to insert a citation in your document, but hide it so that it is not visible to the reader.

Some examples of situations where this occurs:

• You want a reference to appear in a bibliography, even though you have not directly cited it in the text.
• You have inserted a reference in a text box, and this is causing problems with EndNote, so you type the citation manually in the text box, and insert it into the Word document immediately after the text box.
• You are using MLA style, and want to suppress the short title that EndNote is inserting when a citation is repeated.

With author-date styles (like APA and Harvard), suppressing a citation is easy. Use the Edit Citation function and check the boxes labelled Exclude Author and Exclude Year. The citation will still be in the document, but it is no longer visible. The reference still appears in the bibliography at the end of the document.

With numbered styles this technique will not work. As an alternative, you can use the Hidden Text feature in Word. To do this, select the text that you want to suppress, then go to the Font menu in Word. In the Effects section, check the box for Hidden.

By default, hidden text in Word will still appear in your document, but with small dots underneath. When you print the document or convert it to PDF, the hidden text will not be visible. If you are submitting a manuscript to a publisher, remove the EndNote field codes and delete any hidden text before you submit.

For footnote styles (like Chicago 15A), insert the reference into the text of the document, and not into a footnote. Because such styles normally have no template for in-text citations, the reference will not appear in the document, but it will still appear in the bibliography at the end.

Beware: If you have hidden the citation, even you will not be able to see it, unless you unformat the references. It is easy to accidentally delete hidden citations.