Creating a Custom "Tagged" Format
If you have a large bibliography that you would like to import into EndNote, it may be possible to use your word processor’s Find and Replace commands to insert descriptive tags in front of some of the fields of data so that EndNote can accurately import the references. In addition to adding tags, you also need to make a filter to read your tags. (See Choosing the Correct Import Filter for information about using a predefined EndNote Import format if you would rather not create your own filter.)
This topic outlines the basic steps to convert a bibliography into a tagged text file.
Step 1. Save a Copy of Your File
- Open your bibliography in a word processor and save a copy of the file with a new name (this is your backup).
- Remove everything but the reference data from the file.
Step 2. Add Descriptive Field Tags
Use your word processor’s Find and Replace commands to search for unique delimiters between fields, and insert paragraph marks and descriptive field tags in front of specific fields. For this example, we will show a very simple case where only the start of each reference is tagged, and the filter does the rest of the work. This works well for reference lists that have clear delimiters separating the individual components of the reference (author, year, title, and so on). In some cases, you may have better results making additional replacements in the text file before importing. The more tags you add to your data, the greater degree of accuracy you can get with the import filter.
Suppose your references look like this:
Jones, M. (2020) "Quail Intelligence" Avian Science. Vol. 3 no. 2.
Billoski, K. (2012) "Parakeet Smarts" Avian Digest. Vol. 23 no.5.
The process of converting this bibliographic format to a tagged format would be something like this:
- Search for 2 paragraph marks (since the references are separated by 1 blank line), and replace with two paragraph marks and a tag "XX-" followed by a space.
The result is a tagged data file that looks like this:
XX- Jones, M. (2020) "Quail Intelligence" Avian Science. Vol. 3, no. 2.
XX- Billoski, K. (2012) "Parakeet Smarts" Avian Digest. Vol. 23, no.5.
Once you have made all the changes to tag as much of the data as necessary, save the file (as a plain text file), and create an import filter to match the tags and formats of the references.
Step 3: Create a Filter for Non-Delimited Data
Using EndNote, create a new filter to read your data file (see Creating a New Filter). The template of a filter for the above data file would look like this example.
| Tag | Field |
| XX- | Author (Year) "Title" Journal. Vol. Volume no. Issue. |
Each field listed for the Tag must appear in each of your references. If a reference field is missing, all of the data will appear in a previous field. For instance, if you were using the above reference format and a Volume field was not present, the filter would place the Issue data in the Journal field.
To resolve this issue, each iteration of a reference must be entered into the filter according to a hierarchy of formats (longest is always on top).
XX- Author (Year) "Title" Journal. |Vol. Volume no. Issue|.
XX- Author (Year) "Title" Journal. |Vol. Volume|.
XX- Author (Year) "Title" Journal. |`DOI:`DOI|.
To ensure that each source line is imported into your library during import even if it does not match one of the templates you set up, you can turn on the Import Source Into option from the Source Parsing option in the filter. Just identify your source tag, then select import source into and select a field.
Step 4: Clean Up the Data
After you set up your file with tags and create a filter to import it, you should test and refine the filter by importing into a new library. Once your filter is working as you would like it, you can use it to import the data file into your real EndNote library.
If you cannot get the filter to import everything exactly as you want, you may have to do some manual editing to correct this, either before or after importing the data into EndNote. You might find it useful to import into a test library, then use the Change Fields, Move/Copy Fields, and Find and Replace options to clean up the data. Then, transfer these references to your real library with drag-and-drop, copy and paste, or the Import command.