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Cite While You Write (CWYW) is the EndNote toolbar that appears inside Microsoft Word once EndNote Desktop is installed. It is not a separate download and not the same thing as Word’s own built-in footnotes and endnotes feature — that inserts numbered notes at the bottom of a page or document and has nothing to do with a reference manager. CWYW is what lets you search your EndNote library from inside Word, drop a formatted citation at the cursor, and regenerate the whole bibliography automatically as you add, remove, or reorder sources.
What trips people up is not the toolbar — it’s what CWYW actually leaves behind inside the document, and why that has real consequences the first time you share a draft with a co-author or submit to a journal. This page explains the mechanism, not the installation steps; if your EndNote tab is missing from Word entirely, see installing and repairing Cite While You Write instead.
What CWYW actually inserts
When you place your cursor in a Word document and use Insert Citation, CWYW does not just type formatted text like (Smith, 2024) onto the page. It inserts a Word field code at that location — a piece of hidden, non-printing data bound to the visible text. That field code carries a compact snapshot of the reference’s key fields (author, year, title, and enough identifying data to look the record back up), copied out of your EndNote library at the moment you inserted it. University library guides commonly describe this embedded reference data as the document’s “traveling library,” because it travels with the .docx file itself rather than staying only inside your EndNote database.
That’s the whole trick behind reformatting: when you run Update Citations and Bibliography (or switch output styles from the EndNote tab’s style dropdown), Word doesn’t re-query your live library for every citation on the page — it reads the data already embedded in each field code and re-renders the visible text and bibliography from that. This is also why citations can temporarily render as unformatted placeholders that look like {Author, Year, #12} if a style fails to apply, or after certain copy-paste operations across documents — the field code is intact, it just hasn’t been (re)formatted yet. Update Citations and Bibliography fixes that in one pass without you touching each citation by hand.
Why this matters for co-authoring
Because the reference data travels inside the document, a co-author who opens your draft sees correctly formatted citations and a complete bibliography even if their own EndNote library doesn’t contain those references yet — the field codes already carry what’s needed to display and re-format them. What a co-author can’t do without EndNote and CWYW installed on their own machine is insert new citations, change the output style, or run Update Citations and Bibliography; the toolbar commands simply aren’t there, and manually retyping over a field-code citation risks corrupting it.
For a document with several contributing authors, EndNote’s Share Library function (library > Share, on a synced EndNote Online/EndNote Sync account) is the supported way to give collaborators read-write or read-only access to the same underlying library, so everyone’s copy of CWYW is drawing from the same records rather than each person maintaining a private library that only they can add to. See Zotero vs. EndNote for how the two tools’ collaboration models differ if you’re choosing between them for a group project.
Why this matters before you submit
Field codes are an EndNote-specific mechanism, and most journal submission systems, typesetting pipelines, and some plagiarism-checking tools do not expect to find them. Before submitting a manuscript, EndNote’s own guidance is to run Convert to Plain Text from the EndNote tab’s Tools menu, which saves a new copy of the document with citations frozen as ordinary text and the bibliography as a static list — Clarivate’s own warning on that command is explicit: “The copy does not contain Cite While You Write field codes, so you cannot reformat with Cite While You Write.” That’s deliberate: you convert a copy, keep your live, field-coded original for any further edits, and send the plain-text copy onward.
On macOS there’s also a blunt keyboard fallback — Command+A to select all, then Command+6 on the number row (not the numeric keypad) — that strips all Word field codes at once, not just EndNote’s. Clarivate’s warning there is stronger still: doing this will “irretrievably remove the links between your document and your EndNote libraries.” Use Convert to Plain Text for anything you might need to reformat later; treat Command+6 as a last resort on a copy you’re prepared to lose the EndNote connection on entirely.
Platform and Word-version compatibility
CWYW requires Word 2016, Word 2019, Word 2021, or Microsoft 365. On macOS, CWYW works with the locally installed desktop Word only (not Word Online) and is also compatible with Apple Pages. Word Online and Google Docs support exists only through EndNote Web (also called EndNote Online), and only for EndNote 2025 and EndNote 21 users — earlier versions don’t get it. EndNote 20 and earlier are not designed for macOS Tahoe, so if CWYW is misbehaving on a recently updated Mac, an outdated EndNote version is worth ruling out before anything else. Libraries created in EndNote 21 open fine in EndNote 2025 and vice versa, so upgrading the application doesn’t strand older libraries.
FAQ
Is Cite While You Write a separate purchase or download from EndNote?
No. CWYW installs automatically as part of the EndNote Desktop installer and is selected by default; you’ll know it installed correctly if you see an EndNote tab appear in Word. If the tab is missing, that’s an installation or add-in problem to repair, not a feature you need to buy separately — see installing and repairing Cite While You Write in Word.
Why do my citations show as {Author, Year, #12} instead of formatted text?
That’s an unformatted field code — the citation data is intact, it just hasn’t been rendered into your chosen output style yet. Run Update Citations and Bibliography from the EndNote tab to reformat everything in one pass.
Can someone without EndNote open and read a CWYW document?
Yes — anyone can open the .docx in Word (or a compatible viewer) and see the formatted citations and bibliography as ordinary-looking text, because the last time you updated it, EndNote wrote real visible text onto the page. What they can’t do without EndNote and CWYW installed is edit citations, change the style, or add new ones; the field codes underneath stay inert to them.
Do I need to remove field codes before submitting to a journal?
Most journals expect a clean manuscript rather than one carrying EndNote-specific field codes. Use Convert to Plain Text on a copy of the document, and keep your original field-coded file for any revisions.
Does Cite While You Write work in Google Docs?
Only indirectly, and only for EndNote 2025 and EndNote 21 users, via EndNote Web (EndNote Online) rather than the desktop CWYW toolbar. Desktop CWYW itself targets Word (and Apple Pages on macOS), not Google Docs.
