Frequently Asked Questions


Frequently Asked Questions
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CWYW 22: My citations have all shifted up one position in my document. How can I fix this?

Answer: There are several things that can cause your references to shift in your document. The known causes, along with solutions or workarounds, are listed below.

In certain cases a corrupted citation or group of citations will cause all your references to shift in the document. To identify corrupted citations, use the Unformat Citations command in Word. Any citations that do not unformat with the rest are corrupted. As a possible workaround, use this FAQ to clean up the field codes, and then replace the problematic citations.

In EndNote X or earlier, if you insert a semicolon within the prefix, suffix, or pages field for a citation without preceding the semicolon with the accent grave character (to the left of the 1 key on the top of the keyboard, looks like: ` ). Adding this character using "Edit Citation" to these references may correct the issue.

For example, if you require the citation to read

(As seen page 26; Walpole, 2006)

then in the prefix field you would type

As seen page 26`;

If you have been using multiple libraries with the same document, try running Format Bibliography with only a single library. If a citation exists in multiple libraries with the same Reference ID and has been changed significantly in one, shifting can result.

With EndNote 8 and earlier, shifting can occur if you have two citations or groups of consecutive citations in a document that have already been formatted, and you remove the text between the citations or groups of citations to join them together. To avoid this problem in the future, be sure to unformat the citations before trying to group them together.

Currently, we do not have a workaround to correct this issue once it has occurred. You'll need to use a backup of the document, or unformat the citations in the document and move the unformatted citations back to their correct placement.

This page was last modified on: February 20, 2008

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