The Nightmare of Plain Text Citations (and some potential workarounds!)

Picture this: A researcher contacts you. They're wanting to insert citations into a Word document, but the in-text citations and bibliography don't seem to be updating in the document when they insert citations using EndNote. They send the document to you, and you discover all the citations in the document are plain text citations. You follow up with the researcher, and receive the response you most dread: their colleagues added citations manually, without a citation manager.

As librarians, this scenario might seem all too familiar. While I don't have a quick solution for fixing the issue, I do have some workarounds I've employed to help streamline the process of replacing in-text citations with EndNote citations. These workarounds include generating PubMed DOI searches from a plain text reference list using Excel, automatically highlighting plain text superscripts in a Word document, and using the aforementioned Excel sheet as a "cheat sheet" for inserting citations into your document.

Just in case someone else might these workarounds helpful, I included these in the video below. The Excel codes I used for this video are included at the bottom of this post, along with a few notes for each of the codes.

As a note, if you're only interested in converting a plain text bibliography into an RIS, Citation Finder is another great option! If you do use this, however, I recommend using the "Find Reference Updates" option in EndNote, as this will help ensure your citations have more detailed and accurate metadata. 

 

Excel code for extracting DOIs:

=RIGHT(B1:B62,LEN(B1:B62)-SEARCH("doi:", B1:B62)-3)

*Make sure the highlighted ranges include the column that has your citation information. For example, if your citation information was in Column A, you will need to replace all instances of B with A in that Excel code. The "62" refers the last cell in the column that has information in it. You can adjust this number as needed (but be sure to do so for each instance of 62 in the code!). 

 

Excel code for creating PubMed search

=CHAR(34)&C1:C62&CHAR(34)&"[doi] OR “

*Make sure the highlighted range includes the Column that has your extracted DOI’s. The "62" refers to the last cell in the column that has information in it. You can adjust this number as needed (but be sure to do so for each instance of 62 in the code!). 

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!