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EndNote Guide

Update

Important Update Regarding EndNote:

Over the past several years, the use of EndNote Desktop on campus has decreased substantially while the cost of our institutional license has increased considerably. At the same time, Zotero has emerged as a more flexible, user-friendly, and affordable alternative for managing sources. Given these facts, the library is taking steps to migrate EndNote users to Zotero whenever possible, and to transition the campus-wide EndNote subscription to individual licenses that will be available to faculty and staff who demonstrate a compelling reason to retain EndNote Desktop access. Important links related to this transition are listed below.

Selecting a Citation Style in EndNote

Selecting a citation style is the first thing you should do before building your Endnote library.

A "bibliographic output style" is the EndNote term for the type of citation style that will be used in your intext citations and works cited.

EndNote's output style is automatically set to Annotated, which is not a citation style.  You must change the output style to your needed citation style.

To select your citation style:

  • Go to the Bibliographic Output Style drop-down menu at the top of your EndNote library.  It is the box that says "Annotated" and is to the right of the globe icon.
  • Click the box and select the option Select Another Style.
  • Select the style of your choice and click Choose.

Although Endnote has over 400 output styles, the most commonly used are APA, MLA, Turabian, Chicago, American Journal of Botany, Cell, Plant Physiology and ACS.

Always choose the most recent version of the style.

Ex:  When using APA, do NOT choose "APA 5th"
       Do choose the most up-to-date output style for APA, which is "APA 6th"

Is the citation style you're looking for not listed? 
  • Type the style you need into the search bar and select Apply
  • Once you've found the style, click "Download."

  • On your computer, open the folder containing Endnote, and locate the folder labeled "Styles."

  • Drag and drop the new style you've just downloaded from the web to the "Styles" folder. 

  • Your new style will be available to select in Endnote! See above for help on selecting a style. 

Changing Citation Styles

You may change your citation style at anytime. 
Changing the citation style in the beginning of each research project is advantageous because doing so makes it easier to confirm that your imports contain all of the information you need for your citations. 

***If you are finding that your output style does not contain all of the information necessary for your citation, you must manually edit your references.  See the Manually Adding References box in the Importing References tab for information on how to manually edit your references.  Also, sometimes the databases list information incorrectly (e.g. authors' names or titles of articles in all capital letters).  You will need to edit them in the workforms yourself.  See the hints under the Importing References tab.

Need Citation Help?