Problems With Retrieved Data

Blank records

If blank records appear in your reference list, it could be due to a number of causes. One thing to check is whether your filter settings in the connection file match the format of the retrieved records. Open the connection file and view the Templates section. Also show the Connection status window (Show Connection Status on the Tools menu), and set its view to show Record Data. The two formats need to match in order for the data to import.

Sometimes, when viewing the record data in the Connection Status window, you will notice that there is no bibliographic information for a reference that was retrieved. This happens sometimes where duplicate or blank entries remain in the online database. These can be ignored.

Asterisks in author names or titles

For some databases, diacritical characters in the author names and titles cannot be interpreted correctly when EndNote retrieves the references. In such cases, the diacritical characters are replaced with an asterisk (*). A "quick fix" for this is to use the Find and Replace command in the Library menu to change the names with the asterisks to the name with the diacritical characters as they should be.

You may be able to permanently fix the problem by changing the Text setting in the connection file to use a text encoding that matches the online database. Whether this will work depends on the database you are connecting to. Older databases may not support special characters. See The Connection Settings.

In exported references, extended characters appear as boxes

You’ve downloaded references from an online source, and they display correctly in EndNote. But when you export those references to a text file, and open the file with a text reader such as NotePad, all extended characters (for example, umlauts) appear to be corrupted. What happened?

Your online data source likely provided each extended character as two characters – a base letter and a combining character –  rather than as a single, precomposed character. For example, an extended character can be composed of an (a) and then the combining umlaut character (¨) rather than as a single character (ä).

Both character representations are perfectly valid, so initially there is no indication of a problem. Many applications, including EndNote and WordPad, can appropriately display extended characters in either form, but you happen to be using an application that cannot. Windows applications display a box character to indicate that the font or application cannot render the appropriate character.

Even though the characters do not display correctly in the current application, they are still valid. Try opening the file with a different application.

The adoption of Unicode has solved this problem for many modern applications. If the characters do not appear properly in programs you need to work with, you may also need to install a language pack that supports those characters. See Working with Multiple Languages.