Customizing Individual Citations in Word

Customizing Individual Citations

There may be cases where you want individual citations to differ from the standard format. You may want to remove the year or author from a citation if either was mentioned in the context of the sentence. Or, you might want to add a page reference or comment before or after the citation.

For example, assume a formatted citation looks like this:

Hall’s discovery (Hall, 1988)

You can omit the author’s name from the citation:

Hall’s discovery (1988)

You can omit the date from the citation:

the 1988 discovery (Hall)

You can add a suffix with page number(s) to the citation:

the discovery (Hall, 1988 p.4)

You can add a prefix to the citation:

the discovery (see Hall, 1988)

To customize a formatted citation:

Insert and format the citation.
Click on the formatted citation.
On the EndNote 2025 tab, click Edit & Manage Citation(s). All of the cited references in the document are listed, with the citation you clicked on selected. Each citation will show how it is formatted above the reference(s) for that citation, as a subheading within the list. Click on the Reference tab below the list to see details for the reference. Click on the Edit Citation tab below the list to edit the reference.
Select the citation you want to customize.
To change the format of the citation, select one of these options from the drop-down Format menu:

Default Format: Select this menu option to display the citation and format it as defined by the currently selected output style.
Display as: Author (Year): Select this menu option to display both the author name and the year in the highlighted citation, but with the author name appearing to be outside the citation marker.
Exclude Author: Select this to omit the author name from the formatted citation.
Exclude Year: Select this to omit the date from the formatted citation.
Exclude Author & Year: Select this to omit both the author name and the year from an Author-Date formatted citation. This is usually used when you want only page numbers to appear in the citation.
Show Only in Bibliography: Select this option to display the selected citation only in the bibliography, not in the body of the paper.

To add additional text to the citation, use the options below:

Prefix: Enter text here to print immediately before the citation text (include spaces).
Suffix: Enter text here to print after the citation text (spaces and punctuation should be included). You can enter page numbers here if you always want them to print after the citation in a custom format, even if the style doesn't normally include them.
Pages: Page numbers entered here are considered entered into a "Cited Pages" field, so they can be manipulated by the style, just like any other EndNote field. In order to print, the Cited Pages field must be listed in the citation template and/or footnote template of your output style. This is typically used to print the page numbers within a full footnote citation. Most EndNote styles that require a special format for citations in footnotes are already configured this way. You can modify the Citation Template in your output style to include the Cited Pages field.

Click OK to implement the change(s) to the citation.