A "citation" is the brief bibliographic information in the body of a paper that refers the reader to a complete reference in the bibliography. A citation typically consists of a bibliography number or the author and year in parentheses:
... of the species at hand1.
... of the species at hand (Argus, 1991).
Citations can appear as either unformatted or formatted in your Word document.
An unformatted citation is a temporary placeholder, and does not reflect final output. It may appear after you insert selected citations.
Note: If you have Instant Formatting turned on, you may never see an unformatted citation. Instant Formatting is turned on by default.
An unformatted citation typically consists of the first author’s last name, year, and the EndNote record number, with citation delimiters at each end to identify the text:
{Author, Year #Record Number}.
For example:
{Alvarez, 1994 #8}
The unformatted citation makes it easy to identify the record cited. Even if your final goal is numeric citations, you can see meaningful information while you are working on your document.
EndNote relies on these temporary citations to determine which references to include in the bibliography.
The Configure Bibliography command uses an output style to convert all unformatted citations into formatted citations, and reflects final output.
Note: When Instant Formatting is turned on, formatting is done as you insert citations—but you can still use the Format Bibliography tab to change the style or layout of your citations and bibliography.
Formatted citations include hidden Word field codes in case you want to Format Bibliography again later, either after adding more citations or because you want to format in a different style.
Citations formatted in an Author-Date style might look like this:
(Alvarez 1994; Turnhouse 1987)
This is the same citation formatted in the Numbered style:
[1,2]
You can easily revert from formatted citations back to unformatted citations at any time. See Unformatting Citations.