EndNote
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article is about software. For other uses of the word, please see Endnote (disambiguation).
EndNote is a commercial reference management software package, used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays and articles. It is made by Thomson ISI ResearchSoft. The current version is 10 (EndNote X).
Contents |
[edit] Operation
EndNote groups citations into "libraries" with the file extension *.enf or *.enl.
To add a reference to the library, the program presents the user a window with a drop-down menu to select the kind of reference (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, reporter's name, running time, etc.) 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:
| Anthropos | Gray, Henry 1910 Anatomy, descriptive and applied. Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger. [18th ed.] |
| APA 5th | Gray, H. (1910). Anatomy, descriptive and applied (18th ed.). Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger. |
| MLA | Gray, Henry. Anatomy, Descriptive and Applied. 18th ed. Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1910. |
| New England J Medicine | 1. Gray H. Anatomy, descriptive and applied. 18th ed. Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger; 1910. |
Under Windows, EndNote saves a file with the *.enl or *.enf extension along with a 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 capabilties, and files can reside on a central server. It does not, however, have multi-user capabilities for editing a single bibliographic file.
Endnote can serve as a finding tool for PDFs on your hard-disk (or full-text on the web) by putting URLs in EndNote records.
[edit] Issues
The user is expected to know something about the citation style he chooses. 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. 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"
[edit] Alternatives
There are several alternative reference managers, both commercial and Open source, for those who do not wish or are unable to use EndNote.
