The Crossref metadata update integrated into Endnote Web is a terrific feature, filling in missing abstracts, authors, and other info omitted by EndNote’s own browser plugin for scraping bibliographic info from a webpage. One potentially large value added is to correctly place author last names first, followed by a comman, whereas EndNote places each full author name first-middle-last on one line. This would be incredibly tedious to correct manually when, as often the case in science articles, there can be dozens of authors on one publication. The catch – Crossref, in placing the last name first, often moves the middle initial BEFORE the first name, resulting in unnecessary, incorrect duplicate references.
Can this bug in Crossref’s metadata update feature be fixed?
Just for context, Crossref doesn’t ‘push’ metadata to EndNote or any other third party service. We make our metadata available via APIs, which can be used by anyone, including EndNote, to retrieve the metadata.
There haven’t been any recent changes to our APIs that would result in the behavior you’re describing. It sounds like there may be a problem with the integration that Endnote built to retrieve metadata from our APIs and incorporate it in their product.
Without knowing more about exactly what mechanisms their integration uses, I can’t really make any guesses as to what could be causing the problem. I’d encourage you to report the issue to Endnote if you haven’t already. They can get in touch with us if they need our assistance with any problems or recent changes made to their metadata retrieval integration.