endnote

EndNote is a commercial reference management software package, used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays and articles. It is made by Thomson Scientific.

Operation

EndNote groups citations into "libraries" with the file extension *.enl and a corresponding *.data folder.

There are several ways to add a reference to a library: manually, exporting, importing, connecting from EndNote. The program presents the user with a window containing a drop-down menu to select the type of reference they require (book, newspaper article, film, congressional legislation, etc.), and fields ranging from the general (author, title, year) to those specific to the kind of reference (ISBN number, abstract, reporter's name, running time, etc.) Most bibliographic databases allow users to export references to their EndNote libraries. This enables the user to select multiple citations and saves the user from having to manually enter the citation information and the abstracts. There are some databases (e.g. PubMed) in which the user needs to select citations, select a specific format, and save them as .txt files. By then going to EndNote, the user can then import the citations into the EndNote software. It is also possible to search library catalogs and free databases such as PubMed from within the EndNote software program itself.

If the user fills out the necessary fields, EndNote can automatically format the citation into whatever format the user wishes from a list of over two thousand different styles.

For example, a citation for an edition of Gray's Anatomy in a few different styles:

Under Windows, EndNote saves a file with the *.enl or extension along with a *.data folder containing various MySQL files with *.myi and *.myd extensions. EndNote can optionally be installed such that its functionality appears in the Tools menu of Microsoft Word for "cite while you write" and other functions.

EndNote can export citation libraries as plain text, Rich Text Format, HTML or XML. The current version of EndNote has networking capabilities, and files can reside on a central server. It does not, however, have multi-user capabilities for editing a single bibliographic file.

Endnote can also organize PDFs on your hard-disk (or full-text on the web) through links to files or by inserting copies of PDFs. It is also possible to save a single image, document, excel sheet, or other file type to each reference in an EndNote library. Starting from EndNote X version 1.0.1 formatting support for OpenDocument files (ODT) using the Format Paper command is supported.

Issues

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The user is expected to know something about the desired citation style. EndNote will not automatically abbreviate months (except March, June and July) as MLA expects even if MLA is the selected style.

Also, the program might not always detect redundancies if data is not entered properly. For example, if for a newspaper article you enter "2005" for the Year field and then "April 7, 2005" for the Date field EndNote might actually output the date as "April 7, 2005 2005"

Filters, which allow for the seamless transport of citation data into the EndNote reference, may need to be updated. EndNote maintains a page with the corrected versions of the filters.

The Cite While You Write feature in EndNote X2 was originally not compatible with 64-bit versions of Windows, but a patch released in April 2009 should fix this issue.^[1]

EndNote X1 runs natively on both PPC and Intel-based Macs. The Cite While You Write feature of EndNote X1 for Mac OS is only compatible with Word 10.1.2-10.1.6 and Word 2004. Due to changes in the way third party addins are supported in Word 2008, Cite While You Write is not natively compatible with Word 2008. A patch was released on June 26 2008 that restores cite while you write functionality to Word 2008.^[2]

It cannot directly import BibTex files, but there are various third-party methods to transform these into the refer format, which may be imported.^[3]

Endnote/Zotero legal dispute

During September 2008, Thomson Reuters, the owners of Endnote, sued the Commonwealth of Virginia for $10 million and requested an injunction against competing reference management software.^[4][5] George Mason University's Center for History and New Media develops Zotero, a free/open source extension to Mozilla Firefox. Thomson Reuters alleges that the Zotero developers reverse engineered and/or decompiled EndNote, that Zotero can transform proprietary EndNote citation style files (.ens) to the open Citation Style Language format, that they host files converted in this manner, and that they abuse the "EndNote" trademark in describing this feature. Thomson Reuters claims that this is violation of the site license agreement. They also added a restrictive click-thru license to their styles download web site.^[5]

George Mason University responded that they would not renew their site license for EndNote and that "anything created by users of Zotero belongs to those users, and that it should be as easy as possible for Zotero users to move to and from the software as they wish, without friction."^[6] The journal Nature editorialized that "the virtues of interoperability and easy data-sharing among researchers are worth restating. Imagine if Microsoft Word or Excel files could be opened and saved only in these proprietary formats, for example. It would be impossible for OpenOffice and other such software to read and save these files using open standards — as they can legally do." ^[7]

The case was dismissed on June 4, 2009.^[8]

See also

• Comparison of reference management software

References

External links

• EndNoteWeb homepage
• EndNote email list archive
• Blog about use of Endnote at Coventry University, UK
• EndNote Forums