By default, EndNote automatically updates the term lists in a library so they stay current with the data that has been entered into the references. If you enter a term into a reference, and that term is not in the associated term list already, the term appears in red text to alert you that you have entered a new term. This can help you to maintain a controlled vocabulary for keywords and other terms.
You can turn off automatic updating of term lists if you do not want to use the term lists at all. You can also turn this option off and manually enter terms into your lists as described in the following sections. For example, you can manually enter all of the terms you plan to use into a term list before entering references into the library. This can be extremely helpful when you have someone else entering data for you and you want a specific vocabulary used for keywords or other terms. As references are entered into the EndNote library, the term lists can speed data entry, and if a red term appears, the person doing data entry knows that they have entered something that was not intended to be a valid term for that field.
Turning Off the Automatic Updating of Term Lists:
From the EndNoteEdit menu, select Preferences.
Select the Term Lists panel.
Click the check boxes for "Update lists when importing or pasting references" and "Update lists during data entry" to remove the check mark. The feature will be turned off.
Delimiters
EndNote has predefined term lists for authors, keywords, and journals. When you enter multiple terms into those fields and EndNote updates the term list, it needs to know when one term ends and the next term begins. We call the punctuation that separates the terms "delimiters."
For the Author fields, author names must always be entered one name per line. Carriage returns (end of line marks) are the only valid delimiter for this field. Journals normally have just one journal name per reference in this field, so delimiters are not needed here. Keywords are the most complex of the three. By default, EndNote uses carriage returns (end of line marks), semicolons, and backslashes (\) as delimiters for the Keywords field. If you would like to use other delimiters, see "Delimiters used for Separating Terms" in Manually Updating Term Lists.