And now for something different for my graduate school
colleagues (and undergrads if you use this
too): a corrected APA 6th
Citation File for EndNote. If you’re unfamiliar with EndNote, it’s program
that’s rather helpful in keeping your sources organized. If you use EBSCOhost,
EndNote can save you the extra step of having to type in your references
manually. This feature is improved with the use of EndNote Web. When you put
this together with their Cite While You Write feature, you have a pretty
powerful application that will save you time and keep you organized all the way
to the point of submitting your paper. Discussing these features is beyond the
scope of this blogpost, but if you want to learn how to use them, I refer you
to EndNote’s YouTube page. It can take some time to learn, so I’d recommend
learning some of these features before your due date is the next morning.
For my Ph.D. program, I use APA 6th Edition
citations for my papers and research in worship and psychology. I’ve noticed that EndNote was making mistakes in its
citations such as putting an issue number in the citation, putting references
in all caps, and not capitalizing the first word of a subtitle after a colon.
These might seem little, but they add up and can become especially annoying
when you consider that this program is supposed to save you time.
I scoured the Internet trying to find corrected files, but
with no success. I resolved to make my own and it is now ready for consumption.
My file is primarily focused on correcting issues with journal article
citations. If you find other issues, please let me know and I’ll do my best to
correct them. I hope that this file will be of use to you. Click the link at
the bottom of this post to download the citation file, compatible with Mac
and PC. I use it on EndNote X5 and haven’t tested its compatibility with other
versions of EndNote. If you use the file, I would really appreciate a
comment below to let me know you used it and so I know my efforts in making
this file were not in vain!
When you download this file, go to your Program Files (PC)
or Applications (Mac) folder, look for EndNote, and add this file to the Styles
folder. Then open EndNote, go to the drop menu above for citation styles, and
click Select Another Style. Then search for APA 6th Revised Copy.
You’re ready to go. If you use Cite While You Write, you’re going to want to
check your settings in Word to make sure that the citation is in the APA 6th
Revised Copy format. (If all else fails, and you need to ditch EndNote and just need your citations to look right, check out some online sources that will help you manually write citations such as Purdue OWL's webpage.)
Enjoy! And please leave a comment on how the file is for to
you!
