78
EndNote: Citations and bibliographies
21
IT Learning Programme
7
Controlling the Punctuation in a Template –
(
Optional)
Depending on the data available for a particular citation, the punctuation may
need to be varied. For example, if
Publisher
is the last field, it would usually be
preceded by a comma and a space, but in the event that no publisher was entered
for a given reference that comma should be omitted.
EndNote
has a set of
specialist symbols which can be used to manage this.
We will mention here some of these symbols, but because
EndNote
has a complex
series of rules we will not go into detail.
Read
EndNote’s
Help for more information on the special rules of dependency
and interdependency and associations between fields.
The most useful rule to know is that
EndNote
always performs some automatic
“cleanup”. This means that even if the punctuation in your template is not
perfect,
EndNote
may correct it and provide a reasonable output anyway.
7.1.
Adjacent Items are Linked
A field, punctuation or piece of text is usually considered to be linked to its
nearest neighbour/s. So if one member of the linked pair is omitted – say because
a field has no value given – then the other member of the pair is also hidden.
e.g.
Author, Year
If we have no author name for a given reference, the
comma is omitted too.
7.2.
Non-breaking Space ◊
This is used to link adjacent text, for example to link a label to a fieldname. This
means that if the field is present in a given citation, the label plus field will
appear, but if the field is missing then neither will appear.
This is inserted by using
and choosing
Link Adjacent Text
or by
typing C
TRL
+A
LT
+
SPACE
(O
PTION
+
SPACE
with a Mac). It appears as ◊ in the Style
Editor.
e.g.
Edition◊ed.
7.3.
Forced Separation |
This is placed before punctuation to break dependence. Usually, an item of
punctuation immediately beside a fieldname is dependent on that fieldname – so
the field value appears with the punctuation but if no value is present the
punctuation is omitted. | is used to break this link.
| is inserted by typing | or by using
and choosing
Forced
Separation
.
e.g. …
Pages|.
In this case, we want the full stop at the end of the citation, whether we have any
page numbers or not.