The term list feature of EndNote is a great way to keep your reference data consistent and accurate. It also makes it easier if you ever need to manually enter reference data. The journal term list, which is a special kind of term list, allows you to easily substitute abbreviated journal titles for the full journal titles in your bibliography when necessary. A term list is nothing but a simple list of terms. For example, here is a sample term list exported as a text file... and you will see that it's a simple list of terms, with each term on its own line. A journal term list is a special multi-column term list. Here's a sample journal term list, exported as a text file... ...and you can see, that on each line, there are multiple tabbed delimited terms... And if I view this file with a spreadsheet program... you will see that in the first column, there are full journal titles, and in the rest of the columns, there are abbreviated journal titles. Okay, how's this useful to you? Well, let's look at a few scenarios where term lists are used. So let's say I need to create a new reference manually, and I'll have to type in an author name. Now watch this—as I start typing, EndNote tries to automatically complete the author names for me. I'll just keep typing, until I've found the correct author name. If EndNote can't find a matching name, whatever I've typed in will become red. Now, after I've saved this reference, the next time I create a new reference, the author name I've just typed in will become one of the auto-complete options. This auto-complete feature depends upon term lists. What happen is, EndNote keeps a list of all the author names in your library as a term list. And whenever you start typing an author name, it pulls matching names already in its list and presents them to you as autocomplete options. If it can't find a match, whatever you've typed in will be automatically added as a new term in the term list, so that it can be used next time you enter an author name. Now let's look at another scenario. Let's say I'm creating a stand-alone bibliography from a list of references. in the APA 6th style. There are multiple ways to do this— if you don't know how to do that, please refer to my previous EndNote tutorials. I'm going to select APA 6th in my style list, and then select the references that I wish to include in my bibliography. I'm going to press Control-K to 'Copy Formatted', then I'm going to Control-V to paste it to my Word document. And you will see that the bibliography has been generated. But, wait! I know that the style requires the full title for journals— but some of these have abbreviated titles. What's going on? Well, that's because my journal term list is not complete. I either don't have entries for those journals, or I don't have the full title of the journal in the entry. If I have a complete and accurate journal term list, you will see that the bibliography is generated correctly. What happens is, that It'll look for that in the journal term list. And if it finds a match, it'll pull the full journal title. Otherwise it'll pull whatever is stored in your reference. By default, every single EndNote library has three empty term lists when it is created. They are 'Author List', 'Journal List', and 'Key Word' list. You can view those lists by going to 'Tools'>'Term Lists'. And here they are. And as you enter reference data, either manually or automatically by importing from a database, those lists will be updated automatically. You can turn that automatic updating off in EndNote preferences, but I highly suggest that you let EndNote do this favor to you. Term lists are linked to specific fields of the references. This allows EndNote to correctly update the lists with data from the correct fields. For example, author term list is linked to the author, secondary author, tertiary author fields, et cetera. The journal term list is linked to the journal title, secondary or alternate title fields, et cetera. And, as you may be able to guess, the keyword list is linked to the keyword field. Now, those three are not the only lists you can have in EndNote. So, for example, I might want to create a Publisher term List to help me enter publisher data more easily. I will create a new list... And I'm going to call it 'Publisher'... I will leave this unchecked because, as we have seen previously, a Journal Term List is a multi-column list for journal names. Which, this is not. Now I have a new, empty list for publishers. And I'm going to link it to the 'Publisher' field. But it's empty! How do I populate it with terms? Well, EndNote will automatically populate this list from this point on, when you create or import new references from databases. EndNote can also populate this list automatically, with references data that's already in your reference library. All I have to do is to click the 'Update List' button... ...and you can see that the list now has publisher names as its terms. Okay, then—let's check this out. I'm going to create a new reference... and move to the 'Publisher' field... ...and start typing. And it does do the auto-complete. Awesome. Another great term list to have is a label list. So, when I enter reference data into EndNote, I tend to give every single reference labels, to help me categorize the references for easier retrieval later. In my practice, these are a little different from keywords, in that they are typically project names or other labels that only make sense to me. Well the key for a better filing system is consistency. And that's exactly what term lists do best. So let's create a new list called 'Labels'. Here's when the delimiters become important. Basically you will have to decide how you will delimit multiple labels in the label field. For example, I only use semicolons to separate them, so I'm going to only check 'semicolon', so that EndNote knows that everything separated by semicolons is a separate label term. Finally, we have to link this list to the label field. Again, I currently have an empty list— now, let me click on the 'Update List' button... ...and you can see that this many existing labels were added to the list. Now, after using the 'Update List' command, you might find that, due to errors and variations in spelling, you might end up with multiple entries for the same term. So you can see that I have 'Anesthesiology Grant 2011', and 'Anaesthesiology Grant 2011' with British spelling. They really should be the same label. To de-dupe them, I can highlight one of them, and click the 'Delete Term' button. Now, you have to remember, this only changes the term in the term list. It does not change the term used in the references. So the label fields in my references still have those two separate spellings. And the next time I hit the 'Update List' button, all those variant spellings will come back. So what I can do, is to do a library-wide text change in that field. So go to 'Edit', and choose 'Change Text', or use Control- or Command-R on the keyboard... I'm going to choose the 'Label' field... and change... 'Anaesthesiology'... to... 'Anesthesiology'... ...and click 'Change'. Now that everything is consistent, let's say I want to add a few labels to this new reference here. If I start typing, it does autocomplete. If I add a new label, that's not in the list yet, the font turns red... Notice I have to use semicolons, to separate my labels, because I specified that in my term list definitions. If I had specified 'comma', then I would use a comma to separate my labels here. Let's save this reference... Go to another reference... Start typing the new label we just created... ...and it does the autocomplete for that, too. So in this tutorial, we covered what term lists are, and how they're useful. We looked at simple term lists, such as 'Author List', 'Keyword List', and how to create your own term list, if necessary. In the next video, we're going to be looking at journal term lists, and how that can help us keep our data clean and accurate. See you next time!