Article: No more un-citely gaps!

STEPHANIE MARSHALL proves it will get harder to define the ‘typical user’ of EndNote 6. With new functionality, the latest reference management software casts its net out to a wider community than ever before.

However you use your bibliographic software, whether it is to organise a large quantity of corporate reference material at work or to help you write your research papers, you want a software package that is flexible enough to cope with a range of data formats. After all not all references are textual. You may wish to refer to a financial report in Excel or perhaps historical evidence in the form of a photo or even a sound bite from an important speech. Although EndNote 6 is available for both Windows and Macintosh, the facility to organise non-textual references is especially relevant if you are working with an Apple Macintosh, which is very much graphics and icon based. You want the option to be able to organise graphical references in the same way as standard textual references.

Well, since the last edition of TCM there have been some major advances to the World’s most popular bibliographic software - EndNote - in particularly the facility to be able to organise more than just text in your EndNote library.

We had no end of fun really putting EndNote 6 to the test. We tried citing all types of references ranging from sound files (the theme tune to 70s TV series Banana Splits!) to - on a more serious note - company reports in Excel. EndNote coped with most forms of references including, any type of generic image (BMP, TIFF, JPEG) or application file (Excel, PhotoShop, ChemDraw), plus sound files, figures, charts and equations. Best of all, EndNote 6 gives you the same functionality to be able to treat non-textual data the same as standard citations; you can apply keywords when you save the reference into your personal library, which then enables you to search for it when required. Now there is virtually no limit to the types of references you can organise in your EndNote library!

It’s probably easy to miss the importance of this new feature, but we want to emphasise just how groundbreaking it is! The new functionality pretty much means limitless application to any situation where you are required to refer to or organise any type of reference material. Whatever your field of research, whatever your specialism, you can use EndNote 6 to help you write your papers and put together reports. For the chemist writing a summary of their research findings...you can use EndNote 6 to organise and cite your ChemDraw diagrams. For the archaeologist logging their findings from a dig...you can use EndNote to store pictorial evidence for each artefact and then quote those references in your write-up. For the press officer looking to store and organise press cuttings without drowning under a sea of paper...you can scan the whole piece referring to your company as it appears in the journal and save as a JPEG. Then you can group those press images according to product type or magazine type - whichever categories you prefer. I could go on...the list of applications is endless!

‘Ex-cite-ing’ opportunities for collaboration!
EndNote’s ‘Cite While You Write™’ feature has also expanded to accommodate this new functionality. It now enables you to search for and insert any non-textual reference into your manuscript, whether it is a diagram, illustration or spreadsheet. EndNote 6 then tracks these inserted figures the same way it does for text references and automatically builds a figure list for submission. You can move inserted figures around in your manuscript until you are satisfied with their placement and then update the figure list in just one click! EndNote saves the hours of work authors used to spend creating bibliographies and figure lists by hand. And once you have inserted your references into your Word document, they ‘stick to it like glue’. The references are contained in the document’s own ‘travelling library’, which follows it wherever it goes. So, if your colleagues are also working on EndNote, they can capture references directly from your paper to add to their own EndNote library and vice versa.

EndNote 6 gets to grips with manuscripts!
The thought of preparing a manuscript for submission to a relevant journal might strike fear into the most seasoned of authors. If the manuscript doesn’t follow the correct format for the journal, it is automatically rejected! Anyone who knows how particular the requirements of publishers are would surely welcome a tool, which could take care of that formal side of writing and leave them free to concentrate on the actual content.

EndNote 6 now contains built-in templates to guide users through the requirements of publishers for a variety of journals. Completed manuscripts are now ready for submission with all the key elements such as: summary, introduction, results, materials and methods. This naturally speeds up writing and increases accuracy. In fact for BioMed Central (an independent online publishing house for biological and medical research), any EndNote-formatted article comes with something akin to a ‘ready-to-publish seal’. BioMed Central’s system now automatically extracts the structured bibliographic details that EndNote (version 5 or later) adds to the Word manuscript. This saves them time and money and they are keen to pass on those savings to the authors. Therefore EndNote-formatted articles, submitted to their online publishing system will automatically be entitled to a discount on the standard article processing charge. It’s an added bonus, when you can save money for using a software package that actually makes your life easier!