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Contents
User interface, Multi-lingual support, entering citations, generating the bibliography, Entering references, dates, record sub-sets, Searching, Exporting, Importing, Z39.50 searching, Conclusions
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In the last review of Endnote ((version 3) when the three leading products were reviewed, it fell short of
Procite and Reference Manager by a margin despite being the only product with integrated Z39.50 searching. This latest release (4) has a number of improvements in many areas.
The user interface has remained pretty much the same with fairly plain look and feel and
not much colour. Icons and right-mouse button support have been added to improve overall usabilty. and with drag and drop added for inserting citations, this quite an improvement.
Multi-Lingual support has been improved with the addition of definable stop words for
filing - this means that Le, La, Les and other foreign language articles can be defined as well as the English ones which are defaults - compare this with Reference Manager.
One of the the main tasks of a PBM is
entering citations - which can now be done directly
via drag and drop if you use Word or WordPerfect for Windows. This is nice but you cannot launch the search window within Word so you need to be careful about positioning the two
application windows on your screen. Citations added via this method are unformatted text
strings and are converted to codes later when the paper is scanned. Reference Manager inserts codes directly which makes it faster at generating the bibliography - but this is a marginal advantage.
Endnote does not have a floating tool bar option which means the drop down menus have to be
used if you cannot use drag and drop. Multiple citations can be dragged and dropped as a comma separated list.
Generating the bibliography is a simple task - the format command goes through the document and identifies references and builds the bibliography at the end of the document. You
can select from a staggering 534 output styles compared with Reference Manager's 300+. The style manager is very usefully designed with styles organised and sortable by category and name
and with a preview option. Creating and editing is well presented and easy to follow.
The databases in EndNote are called "libraries". Entering and maintaining these
entries is a key function. EndNote presents the familiar two pane interface with the list at the top and the full record displayed below in the default bibliography format. To edit a reference you
need to double click the item which opens another window for editing. I found this less useful than Reference Manager where the split window shows a n immediately editable version above the list. However, the edit window has buttons for going forward and backwards in the browse
lists, so, by adjusting the position of the various windows you can have an ergonomic layout with list, preview and edit box neatly arranged.
When entering a reference, controlled fields such as author, periodical title and keyword
automatically match and display in situ rather than via a combo box. You can enter data from these controlled fields into other non-controlled fields if you wish - an unusual feature which might
be useful. Data entry is overall pretty efficient - if lacking frills. There is however a clipboard viewer - which can be extremely handy if moving data from one application to another.
Dates are not validated so there is no real limit to the year but it does mean mistakes are
easier to make e.g. entering 200 or 20000 instead of 2000. Dates BC are not supported so -2000 is treated as 2000 AD. If you really wanted to, you could enter Roman dates as this field accepts letters!
EndNote has extremely flexible global editing - an easy to use way of updating all the records in a
library. There are facilities to add data to a field before or after existing data, add new data to an empty field as well as change existing data from one thing to another.
Lists are easy to maintain and can be used with any field. New lists can be created and the data
entered from them to any field - but only the pre-existing author, keyword and journal lists can be linked to a field i.e. automatically be used as data is entered. These standard linkable fields can
be linked to fields other than the normal fields if required.
Working efficiently with a sub-sets of records is essential. "Column click" sorting has been added to the display of records and you can select, and reverse-select records for export, print, sorting etc.
Searching the databases - internal or external- the same interface is used. It is an easy to use "fill in boxes" style with a
few improvements over version 3 - you can now save searches for example. There are some nice touches in the search options - like being able to match the case e.g. search for "UN" and not
match "un" It is still only possible to search in one library at a time however whereas Reference Manager does allow a search across all databases simultaneously.
Some other improvements over version 3 are the ability to search for phrases e.g. "activity of water" and to select the relation
attribute. This defaults to "contains" but can also be set to "IS", "greater than", "less than" etc. You can search for empty fields. This improves the searching
tremendously over version 3. Another crucial improvement is to be able to browse the lists to select a term for searching. This both saves time and increases accuracy.
Export formats are somewhat restricted e.g. there are no comma delimited or tagged
options, but you can export as HTML which is useful.
There are 234 import filters available and these can be customised. The MARC importing
capability is not exchange format MARC records but tagged MARC - so it is less useful than it at first appears.
EndNote was the first of the PBMs to have direct
Z39.50 internet searching built in. Retrieved records can be copied to an existing or new database and, via drag and drop, it is
easy to distribute records to a variety of databases There is a good range of pre-built server definitions and you can add your own to this base set.
This version of EndNote is certainly an improvement on the previous version with a number of
gaps being plugged. From the librarians point of view,
MARC export would be nice so that a researcher could pass records directly to an integrated system but most users will not miss this
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