Manually Updating Term Lists

To create a term list automatically from words already in your library, use the Update List button on the Term Lists dialog. This is useful if you have turned off the preference to automatically update your term lists, or if you have received a library from a colleague without a term list, or if you have deleted a term list and wish to recreate it.

The Update List command can apply to just a group or set of search results, or use the All References group to apply it to the whole library.

Important Points about the Update List Command

Update List does not change the terms in your references; it only adds new terms from your references into the term list.
Update List does not add duplicate terms to a list.
Update List removes leading and trailing spaces, but does not change punctuation.
For Update List to update the Journals term list with both a full name and abbreviation, the full name must be entered in the Journal field and a consistent abbreviation must be entered in the Alternate Journal field. See Journal Names and Updating a Journal List for more information on the special needs of the Journals term list.
Update List does not automatically link fields to a term list. For easy data entry, you can link a single term list to any number of fields. See Linking Term Lists to Fields.

To update a term list:

(If you are updating the Journals list, see Updating a Journal List.)

Select a group to update the terms list from, do a search to create the set of references to update from, or manually select a set of references to update from.
From the Library menu, select Define Term Lists… and then select the term list that you would like to update.
Click Update List.
The currently linked fields are listed in the dialog as the fields from which EndNote gathers new terms. If necessary, remove a field from this list by selecting it and clicking Remove Field; or add a new field by selecting it from the Add Field list. Adding or removing field names from this list does not affect the links between fields and term lists.

The Generic field names are used in this dialog. See the List of Reference Types to find the corresponding field names for the fields of various reference types.
To update a term list from only the currently selected references in your library, select the Update Terms From Selected References option.
Click OK to begin the updating process. When finished, EndNote displays the number of terms added to the list. Click OK and the process is complete.

Note: Pressing Esc stops the update process, but all terms added up to that point are kept in the term list.

Delimiters Used for Separating Terms

The text used to separate the terms in a particular field is determined by the "Delimiter" settings on the Lists tab of the Term Lists dialog (select Define Term Lists from the Library menu).

If your keywords are separated by a slash, such as:

Antarctica/ozone/stratosphere

you should select a slash (/) as the field’s term delimiter. A carriage return is always interpreted as a delimiter, so it is not necessary to enter a delimiter for the Author fields or any other field that has terms entered one-per-line. If different delimiters are used for the same field in your references, you will need to do more than one update process, updating from the references with different delimiters separately.

Cleaning Up After Updating

Click on the Terms tab, and scroll through the term list to make sure that the Update List command had the desired result. If it did not, you can highlight specific terms and remove them by clicking Delete Term.

After using the Update List command, you might find that due to errors or variations in spelling, you have multiple entries for the same term. Scan through the list and delete the unwanted terms.

If necessary, use the Find and Replace command from the Library menu to change all occurrences of a term in your library. For example, if both "geochronology" and "geo-chronology" are entered as keywords, you can delete the unwanted term "geo-chronology" from the term list, then click on the Reference List, and select Find and Replace (Ctrl+R) from the Library menu to change "geo-chronology" to "geochronology" throughout the library.