Library Guides: EndNote: Journal titles & abbreviations

About journal title lists

About journal term lists

Term lists are used to maintain the consistency and accuracy of author names, journal titles and keywords in an EndNote library.
Entries are automatically created whenever a reference is added to an EndNote Library.
Journal entries can also include standard abbreviations which are required for styles such as Vancouver and many other medical or scientific referencing styles

You can import journal term lists for many disciplines. These lists contain the preferred full title as well as up to three abbreviated versions of the title.

There are also more term lists available for download from the EndNote website.

Installing Journal Abbreviations

Go to Library > Open Term Lists > Journal Term list
Delete the journals that are appearing on the journals list to start afresh
Click on the Lists tab
Click Import List
Click the list that is most appropriate for your topic. For dentistry, choose 'Medical'

Note if you are on a Mac, you will need to navigate to the Term Lists folder. It can be found under Applications > EndNote > Term lists
Click Open then OK
If you want to install more lists, click Import List... again.
Click Close when you have finished.

EndNote 20 - Installing Journal Abbreviations tutorial

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2 minutes 48 seconds

EndNote 20 - Editing Journal Abbreviations

Go to Library > Open Term Lists > Journal Term list
You can add New Terms for journals that aren't in the list, and you can also Edit existing terms and delete terms.
To edit an individual journal, start typing the name and the list should show the title you want. Once you locate it click the Edit Term button.
Make changes to the title of the journal and add abbreviations if required.
Click OK to save your changes
Click Close to shut the Terms List window.

Finding journal abbreviations

Below are links to find more journal abbreviations sources other than the lists provided with EndNote.

All That JAS
This page lists many different sources across many disciplines that provide access to the full title of journal abbreviations or other types of abbreviated publication titles (e.g., conference proceedings titles).
Journal Record in the NLMA catalogue (PubMed).
These are the abbreviations used by the AMA and Vancouver referencing styles. Search for a journal title to see the abbreviation (or vice versa).
AMA Handbook
If your title is not in the PubMed catalogue, the AMA Handbook offers advice for abbreviating journal titles in Chapter 13.
For words that aren't in Chapter 13's list, you can look up the keywords from the title in the NMLA catalogue or the CASSI search tool to see how other titles with the same word have been abbreviated.
CAS Source Index (CASSI) Search Tool
List of abbreviations used by the American Chemical Society
List of Title Word Abbreviations (LTWA)
The ISSN Center maintains a List of Title Word Abbreviations (LTWA) which you can search for words from other languages (TIP: search for parts of the word, like "educ" or "biomed" if it is not finding your complete word).

Importing lists from the web

You can also import lists from the web, such as the PMEL list for Environmental Sciences by doing some extra steps.

Highlight all the titles in the list and the abbreviations and copy them
Open a Notepad or Text editor window and paste the titles from the web list
Save the file with a .txt extension
If the full journal title is in the first column then load the text file using the same methods that you use to import a journal term list.
If the abbreviation is in the first column, then follow the instructions on how to change a tab-delimited text file to a CSV file.
Once the file is open in Excel, move the full journal title column to the first column of the spreadsheet and save the file as a .txt file. Go back to step 4.