Answered By: Laurissa Gann
Last Updated: Jan 22, 2025     Views: 65287

Never use the backspace or delete keys to remove an EndNote citation. This method can affect numbering, cause errors, and even corrupt the document. Properly remove a citation by using commands from the EndNote tab, or turn EndNote's Instant Formatting off to remove citations safely using the backspace or delete keys. Please see this FAQ to learn how to disable Instant Formatting.

EndNote Tab & Commands

  1. Place your cursor in front of the citation to be removed and right-click 

  2. Choose Edit Citation(s) 

  3. Choose More...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next, a dialog box appears.The citation selected for removal should be highlighted in blue.

  1. Click the down arrow in the Edit Reference menu
  2. Select Remove Citation
  3. Click the OK button

FAQ Actions

Comments (4)

  1. Is it possible to delete all EndNote references/citations from a word document at one time, or must they be deleted individually by following the steps listed above? Thanks!
    by David on Sep 30, 2016
  2. There is not a way to delete all EndNote citations at once from your Word document. You can delete them two ways:

    1. Highlight the citation within the Word document, go to the EndNote tab, select 'Edit Citations & Manage Citations', 'Edit Reference', 'Remove Citation'.
    OR
    2. In Word, go to 'Convert Citations and Bibliography', 'Convert to Unformatted Citatons'. This will convert all of your citations to plain text and allow you to manually delete them one by one.
    by Laurissa Gann on Feb 03, 2017
  3. I'm disappointed that something so obvious as removing all endnote citations is not an in-built function in Endnote. If we have over 500 entries, we'd need to click 500 times to delete everything. Surely it can't be so difficult to program a simple script to remove all traces of citations from a text file? I read another workaround which is to create an empty style, apply it, then convert to plain text - but surely this complicated method should be a one-click button somewhere (with a warning of course).
    by Jackson Li on May 16, 2017
  4. Please contact the company with your suggestions for EndNote: http://endnote.com/support. It's helpful for them to hear feedback from multiple people. We agree that it would be much easier if there was a function to delete multiple citations at once.
    by Laurissa Gann on May 16, 2017

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