EndNote: Editing Journal Names

Some journals require authors to spell out a journal's name in full in a manuscript's reference section, while others require a standardized abbreviation. 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 in the formatted bibliography without having to edit each record, to match the journal’s style.

You must set up a journals term list for your EndNote library to use this feature.

• In EndNote, select Library>Open Term Lists>Journals Term List. Resize the window so that you can see the 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.

EndNote ships with several predefined tab-delimited files containing full names and standardized abbreviations, including those for the humanities, chemistry, law, biosciences, and medicine. These lists can be imported into EndNote to create a working journals term list. To do this—

• If you have not already done so, open the Journals term list (Library>Open Term List>Journals Term List).
• If there are journals already present, delete them by selecting all the journals present and click the Delete Term button. This will ensure that you have no “orphan” journals without complete information or with abbreviations in the Full Journal column.
• Next, click the Lists tab and click 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 (Windows: \\Program Files (x86)\EndNote 21\Terms Lists, and Mac: //Applications/EndNote 21/Terms on Macintosh). The complete list will be imported. (Note that the journal term lists (e.g., Medical) are simply tab-delimited files and updated ones may be available from EndNote.com's website. It is also possible to create your own custom term lists.)
• Close the Term Lists dialog. EndNote will now be able to substitute the version of the name set in the style in the formatted bibliography.