EndNote Cleans Up
Too confused about all these rules? Well, even if you don’t get everything quite right according to the rules, EndNote will do its best to clean up the formatted reference. Obvious problems are fixed automatically.
Normally, field text is entered into EndNote without ending punctuation, so that the selected output style can supply punctuation as required by that particular style. However, when you download references from various sources, some information providers may include punctuation.
For example, when an output style directs EndNote to insert a period after a field, EndNote must determine what to do with any punctuation that already exists at the end of the field in the reference.
| Punctuation found, plus punctuation added by the output style: |
Replaced with: |
| spaces, period | period |
| comma, period (,.) | period |
| semicolon, period (;.) | period |
| colon, period (:.) | period |
| double periods (..) | single period |
| question mark, period (?.) | question mark |
| exclamation point, period (!.) | exclamation point |
EndNote treats other forms of extra punctuation like this:
| Punctuation found, plus punctuation added by the output style: |
Replaced with: |
| double spaces | single space |
| double commas (,,) | single comma |
| double semicolons (;;) | single semicolon |
| double question marks (??) | single question mark |
| double periods (..) | single period |
| comma, period (,.) | period |
| question mark, period (?.) | question mark |
| exclamation point, period (!.) | exclamation point |
| question mark, exclamation point (?!) | question mark |
| exclamation point, question mark (!?) | exclamation point |
One set of punctuation that is never replaced is the period, comma (.,) because it may be used for abbreviations like ed., et al., etc.