Special Cases in Sorting

Except for title fields, quotation marks, parentheses, and other punctuation marks are considered during a sort. In an alphabetic sort, punctuation comes first, then numbers, then letters A-Z.

If the field you selected to sort by is empty in a particular reference, or not included in the selected reference type, that reference will sort before the other references in ascending order.

Author Names

When you select the Author field for sorting, author names from the first Author field are sorted by last name first, then first initial. Next, author names from the Secondary Author field are compared for sorting. Then, author names from the Tertiary Author field are compared for sorting.

If a reference has more than one author in a single field, EndNote includes the additional authors in the sort (up to 255 characters) before moving on to other fields.

If you select the specific First Author field to sort, only the surname is used for sorting.

If your EndNote library includes author names with connectives such as de, di, van, and von, you may want EndNote to skip these parts of the name in order to sort the references by the principal element of the surname. See Sorting Preferences.

Titles

When sorting by title fields, EndNote ignores the words A, An, and The as well as punctuation at the start of the titles. You may enter additional words that should be ignored for sorting purposes when they appear at the beginning of a title. To do so, see Sorting Preferences.

Sorting Diacritical Characters

Characters with diacritics are sorted differently in English, Spanish, Swedish, and other languages. EndNote reads the default language (or locale) setting from your operating system and uses it as the default language for sorting. EndNote typically sorts diacritical characters according to the rules of the language selected for your operating system; however, you can override the default language setting on the Sort Options dialog.