© 8-13-04 Dr. Markus Geisen

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• Product Name: EndNote 7
• Company: Thomson ISI Researchsoft
• URL: http://www.endnote.com
• Category: Database
• Price:
  • Full: $299,
  • Academic: $ 185
  • Student $ 99
• Requirements:
  • PowerMac G3
  • 62 MB Hard Disk space
  • 64 MB available RAM
  • OS X 10.1.5 or later (EndNote 5 is included for use with Mac OS 8.6-9)
• Rating: 4 bounces - Pure Lust

One problem associated with scientific writing is the need to properly reference the various sources of materials used to substantiate the manuscript. Usually such materials are literature references, but especially in science these may also include images, genebank accession codes, images, and tables. Before submission of the manuscript all the in text citations, endnotes, and references need to be formatted in the style, which is demanded by the respective journal. The traditional way of doing this was to manually add citations into the text and at the same time insert the according reference. This procedure is painstakingly slow and usually requires a huge amount of proof reading.

Formatting and cross checking bibliographies often takes ages and is amongst the most boring types of work a researcher can envisage.

There is, however, help at hand. EndNote, which is now available in version 7, is an immensely powerful tool for researchers in science and humanities. Essentially, EndNote is a literature database that seamlessly interacts with your word processor. Whenever you want to cite something all you need to do is to drag and drop or to copy and paste the relevant quotations from EndNote into your word processor and EndNote will automatically build the reference list or the footnotes in accordance to whichever style from the 1000 built-in styles (covering a broad range of relevant journals) you have selected.

I started using EndNote as a student – one of my professors asked me to set up his Mac and do a bit of software maintenance. With the machine came an early version of EndNote and I soon found myself pressed to organize my boss's substantial paleontological library. This was not an especially easy task – paleontological publications can date back quite considerably; some of them are published in obscure journals that have long ceased to exist. With the possibility of selecting from different publication types like journals, book sections or theses even this task was manageable. I am still using parts of the database I created about ten years ago – luckily all EndNote databases are upward and downward compatible and work across hardware platforms as well.

Installation

Installation is easy – there is an installer on the compact disc that does all the work, which includes installing the interface with Word. Things are a little bit more complicated if Word is localized for foreign languages. In this case files need to be copied into Word´s startup folder manually, but the procedure is explained in detail in the manual. Having said this the manual is worthwhile mentioning: EndNote offers you a wealth of tools and the substantial, well-structured manual provides precise information as to when and how to use them. Equally there is a lot more output styles, upgrades, and templates on their website.

Features

EndNote is easy to use. The main interface is the library window that shows certain fields of your database (see below) Normally this will be the entries in the fields author, year and title, but this can be configured as you like. I have added the label field, in which I store my own library accession code. One slight drawback however that did not change over the years is the way text is displayed in the library window. Only plain text is displayed, which is not very practical for the italicized genus and species names paleontologists and biologists use. Albeit this can be circumnavigated by switching on the preview function, but this will only display the fields used by the output style that is selected, but includes formatted text.

The data entry window for new references offers a selection of 28 reference types (journal article, book, book section, PhD thesis, and also figures), which can be edited (see below). Adding data to the fields is easy and thanks to auto completion from term lists where authors names and journals and their abbreviations, and keywords are stored, this is a fast process. It normally takes me about two minutes to add a journal article and a bit more for books and book sections, which amount to roughly 90% of my references.

Term lists (see image below for my journal list with abbreviations. Note that I consider this an appropriate place to store accession codes from The Natural History Museum library in London as well) are great – they really help keeping the library consistent as far as spelling of authors names and journals are concerned, but they also take the journals abbreviations which bare required references in most articles. For humanities, chemistry, and medical science thousands of journals and their abbreviations are supplied – however scientists working in other fields will have to manually enter data. This is a bit of a shortcoming and it would be nice to see future versions of this program incorporating subsets of the ISI journal lists for more scientific disciplines.

There are about 1000 different output styles that cater for articles submitted to most of the high-quality journals. Editing a style to match the requirements of a publisher not on this list is easy (see below for a style produced for books published by Springer Publishing Group. Clicking on items in the scroll list to the left will display the respective settings). Only minor database management knowledge is required to edit your own styles and again the information in the manual allows for a steep learning curve. Even specific pre- and suffices like “i.e.”, “e.g” or page numbers are catered for (see manual page 258). Especially Taxonomists with their long list of synonymies will love this feature. The output styles also take care of the more obscure formatting affairs, like the inclusion of numbered notes along with your references, as is required by the journals Science for acknowledgements and online material.

Unlike the early versions of EndNote where formatting the bibliography was the last thing you did with your finished document the “Cite while you write” function automatically formats your citations and references as soon as you put them in your Word document. This function used to be rather quirky with older versions of Word using Mac OS 9. However this version for Mac OS X runs rock solid and I find it helpful to work with the complete text and not just the placeholders. In this context it is worth mentioning that the reference data is stored as a “Traveling library” with your word document, so sharing the work with colleagues that do not have the same library database is possible. Equally it is possible to extract all the references from a Word document by using “Export traveling library” from Word´s Tools menu.

EndNote works in connection with literature databases and downloads references for a specific topic. Import filters for 349 commonly used catalogs are supplied with the program, however most of them reside in the United States (see below for search results searching for literature about biomineralization at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution library). I only use this function for literature searches, because there are normally a number of inconsistencies in the databases that can cause erroneous references if they are not carefully checked. More information about specific difficulties of importing data from different sources is provided when the more info button on the import window is activated.

What's New in Version 7

Over the years, EndNote has improved in many ways. This new version now offers access to your databases on Palm OS handheld devices, which is great for the quick dash over to the library. That is if you happen to own a Palm handheld….

The main new feature in this version is the ability to have figures, images, tables, and even video- or sound files linked with your literature data (see below for an example of an image file linked to the database). Such materials can be inserted in the text and will be numbered and referenced properly. Although this sounds rather easy most databases have a rather crude interface to do this and the way this function is now implemented is really great. When your work is strongly image based this is an extremely useful function: Biologists can now store images of species taken from first descriptions along with the literature information. But this is not only a useful feature for Biologists – it is easy to envisage how this function can be used to speed up report writing and grant applications.

Another improvement that is worthwhile mentioning is to find matching references from any highlighted text. Simply write your text or quotation, highlight the search term and go to the “Find citation(s)” in Word´s tool menu. Voila - EndNote produces a list of all matching references (see image below for search results of my database highlighting the term CO 2 in the text).

Subject bibliography management is another new tool I am using regularly. This is a quick way to produce reading lists (based on keywords) or curricula vitae (based on author) or any other combination of fields (see below for a part of my own bibliography) and has replaced the rather crude workaround I have used so far.

With the “cite while you write” function EndNote has supported seamless interaction with Microsoft Word since a number of earlier versions – the new built-in RTF document scan now offers users of other word processors like Nisus Writer a quick and easy way to scan and format bibliographies. As EndNote supports MacOS X Services the RTF document scan is available either from directly from EndNote or from any other word processor. Additionally, bibliographies can now contain and manage charts, figures and tables. Combining these features with the built-in document templates that conform to numerous journals' instructions for authors (strangely a template for the well known journal Science is missing) transforms EndNote from a literature database into a powerful manuscript manager.

Conclusion

All in all, EndNote is a software that has saved me a lot of time producing and checking reference lists. Additionally it has given me the chance to keep my literature organized. Generally I would recommend this software for every researcher in the fields of humanities but especially in science. The more interesting question is if an upgrade to this version is justified as the earlier versions were already at a high standard as far as functionality and compatibility are concerned. So lets have a look at the economical aspects. The functionality of EndNote version 7 comes at a cost: The basic price for a full version is $299, the educational version ships at $ 185, and the student version is $ 99. Given that most users will work in academia the reduced prices will apply and upgrading to this version seems justified, especially if you are not using Word as your main word processor, if including images and charts is of importance to you, or if you are interested in using your library on a Palm handheld.

- Dr. Markus Geisen

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