Hi there. I have read a few posts on topics like this already but haven’t found quite the answer I’m looking for. So any help/advice is appreciated!
I’ve been merrily using endnote for citations, using footnotes.To do so I go to endnote, R-Click and copy the citation, then in the footnote in Scrivener, I paste it, and add the @page number where needed.
I just compiled a doc to Word and in the Endnote toolbar, clicked “convert citations to plain text” and… it said there were no citations.
Can anyone explain this in a way that is comprehensible to someone who really doesn’t understand computer language/coding? Is it that the copy & paste ONLY copies the text of the citation, as opposed to the code that says “endnote citation here”?
I used to use “copy formatted” but that gave me the actual citation - I want to keep it as codes until the final conversion to word, but if doing that means losing all my citations and having to redo them… maybe not!
I haven’t used Endnote for about twenty years, but this help page https://www.myendnoteweb.com/help/ENW/hs_formatpaper.htm shows that things haven’t changed that much. Make sure you have the delimiters and other information as shown on that page, and you should be OK. The problem is likely to be at the Endnote/Word end of things, rather than the Scrivener end of things. The use of curly braces as delimiter and scanning of an RTF file to convert everything seems to be fairly universal. Word is often a pain in the neck to me because it likes to do things its own way. I avoid using it when I can.
I used Scrivener/Bookends/Nisus Writer Pro for my doctoral thesis without any problems, so it can be done.
The citekey or the reference?
What exactly is a citekey and how do you copy it?
Yeah, that didn’t work… I also avoid word as far as possible but sadly most places where I submit files require it or don’t have other options 
A cite key is the complete code that either you or the reference software add to the text, e.g {Smith, 2019}
When you have the compiled .rtf file the reference software, which needs to have that reference in your local database, substitutes those cite keys for the real reference, as shown in the page MBBNTU linked to.
This is what a piece of text with a footnote looks like for me (using a temporary citation inserted with Bookends). It has curly braces as the temporary citation delimiters, the author name, year of publication, the unique ID number of the reference, and the page number after the ampersand. Is that what your temporary citations look like?
PS: I would suggest that you try compiling to RTF first, scanning the RTF file with Endnote, then opening and saving the finished document in Word. That will convert the final version to Word format.
MAJOR EDIT: I went back over my MS Word CWYW toolbar and tried tinkering with it. instant formatting was turned off and I turned it on and BINGO! everything seems to be working again. so I guess at some point I turned it off by mistake? worth knowing - and this has all still been really helpful, thank you! 
:mrgreen: 
That’s what I thought the cite key was, I’d just not heard that term. But yes, that’s what they look like.
However, I tried exporting to RTF to convert from there and they are also not recognized there…
edit to add:
here is how the code looks in my scriv doc (there’s another one right above it)
when I did the RTF scan, this was the dialog box which didn’t give me much to work with. when I then opened it as an RTF, there were no references in it at all. when I tried opening it with word, MS word showed the citekey info but they were just blank black text/white background, there weren’t any field code tags around them (as in those grey boxes that happen when you insert a citation direct into word) and the convert button told me there were no endnote references in the doc (despite the fact I was looking at 4 of them just on a single page)
also edited to add I’ve been using scrivener a while and never had this problem before. I wrote an article a couple of months ago with these citations and they all worked fine just straight up converting to word.