Creating EndNote Styles

1 Instructions to Authors
The place to start is by looking up the instructions to authors at the journal’s web site or in the
reference instructions section of the style manual you are using. You may also need to consult
sections on in-text citations, footnote styles, illustrations, and tables.
Below are the sections regarding references from one online set of instructions to authors. They
are presented in the order they appeared in the original instructions, although intervening text has
been removed for the sake of brevity. These will be used in the class to create a style.

1.1 Figures
Figures should be numbered consecutively using Arabic numerals (Fig. 1, 2, etc.), in order of their
mention in the text. A fully descriptive caption should be provided for every figure and the
complete list of captions typed together on a separate page.

1.2 Tables
These should be numbered in Roman numerals (Table I, II, etc.), in the order of their mention in
the text. A brief title should be typed directly above each table, not on a separate page. Footnotes
to tables should be indicated by superscripts and typed at the bottom of the tables.

1.3 References
The list of references should be arranged alphabetically according to the surname of the first
author and set out as follows:
d'Amber, C. & de Chaos, M. (1990). The dragons of Kolvir: Shadow and substance. Dragons
Today 13, 7-11.
Grayhame, G. (1978). Territorial behaviour of male noble dragonets (Draconis noblis). Journal of
the Draconic Guild of the Realm of Faerie 58, 731-734.
Magnus, A. G. (1959). The nature and physiology of the pituitary hormones of dragons. In The
endocrine system in dragons (Faust, E., editor), pp. 404-422. Amber: Unicorn Press.
Ambrosius, M., et al. (1023). Nesting behavior of the northern ice dragon. Dragon Behavior. doi:
10.002/db.1022.003.
The order in the list should be:
Single authors. Where more than one reference is given for a single author the publications
should be listed chronologically.
Two authors. These should be arranged first alphabetically, then chronologically. For in-text
citations, use the names of both authors and the year. Do not use et al. for two-author references.
Three or more authors. These should be arranged chronologically. For all text citations use the
surname of the first author only, followed by et al. and the date.

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1.4 Instructions to Authors: Citations
If more than one reference by the same author(s) published in the same year is cited, use a, b, etc.
after the year in both text and list, e.g. (1963a). Text citations can be given in either of two ways:
(a) with date in parentheses, ‘as demonstrated by Jones (1956)’; (b) with names and date in
parentheses, ‘according to recent findings (Jones, 1956)’. Where more than one reference is
cited in the text these should be in chronological order, e.g. Smith, 1975; Arnold, 1981; Jones,
1988. Journal titles should be given in full. The full title of the paper, the volume number and
the page numbers should be given.

2 Creating an EndNote Style

To create a new style from scratch, select Output Styles>New Style from EndNote’s Edit menu.
You will see a window like the one below. The different sections and subsections in the style will
contain information about the style and control how EndNote will format citations, bibliographies,
footnotes, and graphics when this style is used. Each section of the style must be set up to match
the instructions to authors for the selected journal.

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 It is a good idea to immediately save this style with a new name, and then to save it frequently
while you are working on it. If you do this you can close the style if you need to take a break for a
while. EndNote X2 or later will automatically save new and edited styles in your \My
Documents\EndNote\Styles folder. If you are editing styles that already exist, be sure to give the
edited version a new name so that you can tell it apart from the original in the main styles folder
because both will appear in your list of available styles.

2.1 About this Style

Here you can record information about the style, such as if it is based upon a style manual, and
which scientific discipline, or category, it is for. In the comments and limitations section you can
record any special comments you have about the style, and also any limitations in EndNote that
may prevent the program from being able to match perfectly the requirements of the style manual
or instructions to authors. Although EndNote can match very complex style requirements, it
cannot match all style requirements for all journals. For example, in the instructions used in this
example, EndNote cannot sort works with two authors alphabetically, but three authors or more
chronologically in the bibliography. Only one sort order can be applied, and this would be a good
place to explain that to the user.

2.2 Anonymous Works

In this section you can set preferences for how citations and bibliography will be formatted and
sorted if there is no author for a record. If the instructions to authors provide no information on
how to handle anonymous works, check example bibliographies in the journal if you have a copy
of it, or contact the publisher for information. In this case I have no information on how this
journal wants anonymous authors treated, so I am going to leave the author blank. Nothing will be
substituted for the author’s name and references with no author will precede reference with
authors when sorted.

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2.3 Page Numbers

Different journals and style manuals have different requirements for how page numbers should be
displayed in the bibliography. Some may require the full range of pages while others require only
the digits that are different. EndNote has the ability to change the way the page numbers are
displayed in the bibliography from the way they are entered, and the settings for doing so are in
this section.
In examining the references included in the instructions for our example, the full range of page
numbers is shown, so page range “731-734” shows all of the digits. However, because different
online databases and different journals present their page ranges in different ways, it is possible to
have this page range in your EndNote library show as any of the combinations below.
 731-734
 731-34
 731-4
If we leave the setting at the default, Don’t change page numbers, the bibliography will be correct
only if the full range of pages is entered in the library. To have it show the full range of pages
when any of the options above are entered in the library, select the Show the full range of pages
option in this section.

2.4 Journal Names

Much like some journals require the full range of pages while others an abbreviated version, some
journals require the journal’s name be spelled out in full while others require a standardized
abbreviation, or vice versa. Some disciplines may even have multiple versions of the standardized
abbreviation, such as one with periods after abbreviated words and one without periods. EndNote
can substitute one version of a journal’s name for another if you have set up a journals term list of
the full name and standardized abbreviations. So the first step in setting your journal names
preference actually begins in setting up a journals term list for your EndNote library.
[Note: There is a video on our training page at [Link]/training called Journal Names
that covers creating a journals term list and editing just the journal name section of the style to do
this.]

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2.4.1 The Journals Term List
In EndNote, select Open Term Lists>Journals Term List from the Tools menu. Resize the
window so that you can see all the abbreviation columns as in the example below.

As references are entered into EndNote the contents of the Journal field are added to the Full
Journal column in the term list while the contents of the Alternate Journal field are added to the
Abbreviation 1 column. If there is only one version of the standardized abbreviation and the full
journal, everything you need in this table will be filled in so long as each record entered in the
EndNote library contains the full journal name in the Journal field and the standardized
abbreviation in the Alternate Journal field. In reality, this is seldom the case. However, it is
possible to manually enter the information in the term list, or better yet to import a list of the full
names and abbreviation(s) from a tab-delimited file if you have one.
EndNote ships with several predefined tab-delimited files containing full names and standardized
abbreviations, including those for the humanities, chemistry, law, the biosciences, and medicine.
These lists can be imported into EndNote to create a comprehensive list of journals. To do this—
 Open the Journals term list.
 If there are journals already present, delete them by selecting all the journals present, then
selecting the Delete Term button. This will ensure that you have no “orphan” journals without
complete information or with abbreviations in the Full Journal column.
 Select the Lists tab.
 Select Import List.
 Locate and double-click on the tab-delimited file you wish to import. The predefined lists that
ship with EndNote will be found in the Terms Lists folder within the EndNote folder. The
complete list will be imported.
 Make note of the column for the abbreviation or full name that your new style requires.
Close the Term Lists dialog. You can now set the style to use the correct version of the journal
name from the journals term list you created.

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2.4.2 Journal Names in the Style

In the default journal name settings the style will usually be set to Don’t replace. Change that to
the option needed for your style. The instructions to authors for this style show full versions of the
journals’ names, so Use full journal name is the option to choose for this style.
When EndNote formats the bibliography using this style it will compare every record in the
bibliography to every entry in the journals term list. If it finds a match in any of the columns it
will then substitute the full journal name for the contents of the record’s Journal field in the
formatted bibliography.

2.4.3 Sections

If you require a separate bibliography at the end of each section of a Word document, or at the end
of each section and at the end of the entire document, you can set that option here. Please note
that this will create a separate bibliography for each section break in Microsoft Word, even if they
are on the same page (continuous) or inserted just to change a page from portrait to landscape
mode.
This feature is only available when using Cite While You Write with Microsoft Word.

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2.5 Citations
The citations section controls how in-text citations will be formatted. Here you can select the
fields that will be included as well as how those fields will be displayed.

2.5.1 Templates

The citation template controls the fields that will be present, as well as the punctuation. There is a
menu of fields and special codes that can be inserted into the template via the Insert Field button,
as shown above. Our sample instructions to authors indicate that this is an author-date citation
format, so I have inserted the Author and Year fields within a set of parentheses in my template
for the default option, and the author’s name outside the parentheses for that option.
If the journal style uses numbers instead of authors and dates, you would use the Bibliography
Number option from the Insert Field menu, then apply any formatting to it such as superscripting
or surrounding it with parentheses.

2.5.2 Ambiguous Citations

When using an author-date format it is often possible to have two references with the same author and
year. These are called “ambiguous citations” and this dialog allows you to select how you want these
handled. The sample instructions to authors require that a letter be appended to the year in this case,
but it does not tell you which of the two formats shown above (2000a,b or 2000a, 2000b) you should
use when there is more than one such entry in a citation. This is another example of a situation where
you may need to find a copy of the journal to see which method of the two is actually preferred.
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2.5.3 Author Lists

The Author Lists option allows you to control how many author names will appear in the citation, with
the option of having the first appearance different than subsequent appearances of the same citation.
Our author instructions say that if there are three or more authors only one of them should be shown,
then “, et al.” The example above shows the setting for this option matching the instructions to
authors. The ampersands between authors are used based on the sample references given.

2.5.4 Author Name

The Author Name section controls how the authors’ names will appear within the formatted citation.
The default here is the appropriate choice for most in-text citations—Last Name Only. Note that there
is an option to use initials for authors with the same last name, which can reduce confusion if there are

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multiple authors with the same last name. There is also an option to omit the author’s name if it is
repeated in a consecutive citation.

2.5.5 Numbering

If you are using a numbered style you can set options for how number ranges will be handled here.
One of the new features in EndNote X3 is composite citations, the ability to group citations to meet the
requirements of many chemistry journals.

2.5.6 Sort Order

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The Sort Order screen allows you to set the sorting order that will be used within grouped citations.
The instructions to author say that where more than one reference is cited in the text, they should be in
chronological order, so I have selected the Year + Author option shown above.

2.6 Bibliography
This section of the style controls most of how the bibliography will be formatted. There are some
options that are controlled from the Format Bibliography command in Word, such as line and
indentation spacing, and some options that are controlled by Word alone.

2.6.1 Templates
The bibliography template is the heart of the style. Here you can set the fields which will be
included for each reference type, the order of those fields, and how those fields are formatted.
Begin by examining the examples and instructions in the instructions to authors. In our sample
instructions we have examples of the following reference types:
 Journal Article: Grayhame, G. (1978). Territorial behaviour of male noble dragonets
(Draconis noblis). Journal of the Draconic Guild of the Realm of Faerie 58, 731-734.
 Book Section: Magnus, A. G. (1959). The nature and physiology of the pituitary hormones of
dragons. In The endocrine system in dragons (Faust, E., editor), pp. 404-422. Amber: Unicorn
Press.
 Electronic Article: Ambrosius, M., et al. (1023). Nesting behavior of the northern ice
dragon. Dragon Behavior. doi: 10.002/db.1022.003.
These give us the information we need to create templates for a book section, a journal article, and
an online electronic article, as seen below.

To create the templates—

1. Select the Reference Types button, then select the reference type of your choice to add an
empty cell for that reference type to the template.
2. Use the Insert Field button to select fields and special characters to add to each cell.
3. Enter any punctuation needed by the style.

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4. Select each field name that requires special formatting, such as bold or italics, then select the
formatting option from the formatting toolbar in EndNote.
5. Add special characters as necessary. The special characters available for style templates are
described below. With the exception of the accent grave (`), all of these can be selected from
the Insert Field menu.
Special Character Properties of Special Character
End of Paragraph This will insert a line break.
( ¶ : the paragraph mark)
Tab This will insert a tab.
( → : the tab arrow)
Singular/Plural This is used between the singular and plural versions of textual
( ^ : the caret) additions to the style. For example, in the Book Section
template above, “p.^pp.” indicates that if there is only one page
number, then “p.” should be used but if there is more than one
page number, then “pp.” should be used.
Field Name Indicator This is used when inserting text that is the same as a field name.
( ` : the accent grave) EndNote reads this as the command “leave the text within the
accents as typed, do not consider it a field.” In the Book Section
example above, the word “editor” is also the name of an
EndNote field. If it were entered without the accents
surrounding it, EndNote would insert the contents of the Editor
field instead of the text.
The two special characters below allow you to control how EndNote links fields, text, spaces
and punctuation together in a style. By default, the punctuation and spaces following a field
are linked to that field. If the field is not present in the record, neither the field contents nor
the punctuation and spacing following that field will appear in the bibliography. Sometimes
this can cause problems. Sometimes punctuation and spacing should be present only if the
field following them is present instead of only when the field before them is present.
Examples are given below.
Link Adjacent Text This will link the text preceding it to the text following it, and
(  : the small diamond) usually is used in place of a normal space. It is similar to a
nonbreaking space in Word. In the Book Section template
above, the “p.” or “pp.” and their preceding comma should be
present only if there is data in the Pages field. The Link
Adjacent Text character between the comma and “p.^pp.” links
the comma to the singular/plural text string; it also links the
“p.^pp.” text string to the Pages field following it. If there is
nothing in the Pages field, the comma and the “p.^pp.” will not
appear in the bibliography.
Forced Separation This will break the normal link between a field and the text
( | : the vertical line) following it. In the Book Section example above, the colon
would normally be linked to the City field preceding it. If there
was no data in the City field, the colon would not appear.
However, we want it to appear whenever there is data in the
Publisher field, whether or not there is data in the City field. To
accomplish this we put a Forced Separation between the City
field and the colon, then use Link Adjacent Text to link the
colon to the Publisher field.

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2.6.2 Author Lists and Author Name
The Author Lists and Author Name sections work as they do in the citation template. The Editor
List and Editor Name work the same as the Author List and Author Name fields do, except that
they will be applied to the Editor and Series Editor fields for most reference types. Because the
editor is the primary creator of an edited book, the Editor List and Editor Name options will not
apply to the Editor field for the Edited Books reference type; instead, the Author Name and
Author List options will apply to the Editor field for the Edited Books reference type.

2.6.3 Field Substitution

Field substitutions can be helpful where there may be a set of choices on which field to include.
For example, the journal may prefer the DOI be used if it is present because it is a permanent link,
but the URL for the full text be used if a DOI is not available. Substituted fields will only appear
in the bibliography if the preferred field has no data in it.

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2.6.4 Layout

There may be times you want to add special extra fields, punctuation, or text to the beginning or
end of every reference, no matter what type. You can use the Layout section for this. There is a
drop-down list of fields that can only be added, as shown in the screenshot above: Reference Type,
Citation (a copy of the in-text citation before or after the bibliography entry), Bibliography
Number, and Record Number are such fields. However, you can also manually type in the generic
field name for a field that is not on the list.
You can also set if and how hanging indents will be included for the bibliography here.

2.6.5 Sort Order

The Sort Order options control how references in the bibliography will be sorted. You can use
one of the preset sort orders or create your own custom sort order by selecting the “Other” option.
Sometimes EndNote is incapable of following the instructions to authors perfectly, as in our
present example. The instructions to authors for this style require that if there are one or two
authors, the references should be sorted by all author names (even if “all” is only a maximum of

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 two) and then chronologically, but if there are three or more authors they should be sorted
chronologically. EndNote can only using one sorting order within a bibliography. EndNote must
be consistent in its sorting method. I have chosen the Author + Year + Title option as that most
likely to meet the requirements most of the time. [Note that sometimes the instructions do not
reflect the actual practice of the journal. In a case like this, it would be worth checking some
actual articles to see if the instructions really match.]

2.6.6 Title Capitalization

For the English language, EndNote can change the capitalization of the title used in the reference.
In looking at the examples in the references I see that the titles are all in sentence case, so I have
selected Sentence style capitalization as my preferred option. This means that if I have entered
some titles in Headline style (with the first letter of each word except prepositions, conjunctions,
and articles in uppercase), EndNote can convert those titles to have only the first word of the
sentence, and the word after a colon, capitalized. This can be a very handy feature, but sometimes
there are words that we do not want EndNote to change, such as the names of people, cities, or
countries.
You can set a list of words that EndNote will not alter the capitalization of in the Endnote
preferences. Open the preferences and select the Change Case option. Type in each word you
want to add to the exceptions list and click on the Add button after each word. Close and save
your preferences when finished.

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2.7 Footnotes

The footnote settings control how any reference that is inserted into a footnote will be formatted.
Its options are almost identical to those for a bibliography with the exception of the Repeated
Citations options.

2.7.1 Repeated Citations

When full-reference footnotes are used, some styles require a shorter version of the footnote after
the reference’s first appearance in the paper. Options for how these repeated footnotes will be
handled are set here.

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2.8 Figures and Tables
2.8.1 Figure and Table Placement Options

The screens for placement options for inserted figures and tables and their captions are identical.
Here you can set if they should be inserted below the text in which they are entered or in lists at
the end of the document. You can also set whether the captions should be above or below the
figure or table, and if the caption and label should be on one line or two.

2.8.2 Separation and Punctuation

Here you can set how much space will be allowed above and below tables and figures and whether
or not to place a period after labels and captions.

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2.8.3 Setting Caption Options for Figures and Tables in Word
The instructions to authors for this style specify that table captions must use Roman numerals for
their numbering while figure captions must use Arabic numerals. This is a setting that is not
controlled by the EndNote style, but you can set caption numbering for a document in Word 2003
by following the instructions below and then inserting your figures and tables from EndNote.
To open the caption numbering options in Word 2003 In the Caption window select the
select Reference>Caption from Word’s Insert menu as type of caption you wish to edit
shown below. from the Label pull-down menu,
then select the Numbering button.
This will bring up the Caption
Numbering screen, where you can
set the type of numbering you wish
to use.

To open the caption numbering option in Word 2007 select

the Insert Caption button from the References tab on the
Ribbon.

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3 Styles: An Easier Way
A far easier way to create an EndNote style is to edit a style that already exists and save it with a
new name. You can preview how a style will format a journal article, book section, and book by
selecting the Style Info/Preview button in the Style Manager, as shown below.

Another way to find a style similar to the one you want to create is to use the EndNote Style
Finder. To use the Style Finder go to [Link] Enter some
basic criteria as shown in the example below, such as the first three fields that should appear in the
bibliography for a journal article, the citation style, and the bibliography sort order, then select the
Find Styles button to begin your search. You will be presented with a set of styles that match
your criteria. You can then take one of them and edit it instead of building the whole thing from
scratch.

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