Technical Computing Magazine - Issue 35

X marks the spot

Stephanie Marshall
Product Specialist

With comprehensive online database searching capabilities, advanced reference and image organisation tools and the power to create bibliographies instantly as you write, it's no wonder that EndNote® is a favourite with millions of researchers, authors and students all over the world. Now there's a new version, with new PDF management capabilities and much more.

Whether you're writing a technical proposal or documentation, a research paper or a book, a dissertation, grant application, report or CV, you'll find new EndNote X an invaluable companion to your word processor. Instead of spending hours sorting card indexes, inserting yellow stickies, typing in and formatting every reference, then more hours preparing bibliographies and lists of figures, EndNote X does it all for you!

You can use EndNote X to connect to Internet-based libraries of reference data and locate exactly the references you need to cite in your work. It's then simple to store, catalogue and index these references in your own reference libraries, together with images, figures, files and links that you want to refer to.

Then EndNote X integrates into your word processor to insert citations directly and create bibliographies and figure lists, with every entry automatically and consistently formatted in the style you, your organisation or your publishers, prefer. If you're already an EndNote user, you know all that already. So what's new in this latest version? With more and more reference resources stored and shared on the World Wide Web these days, handling electronic documents in the standard PDF format becomes ever more essential. EndNote X makes it easy to manage PDFs – just drag and drop a PDF file onto an EndNote record and the link will be created automatically. These links remain fixed wherever you move your library of references, so you should never encounter the dreaded “broken link” scenario. What's more, you can convert your existing PDF links into the new format in a single step.

You can easily identify PDF links as there's now a PDF icon displayed in the reference list. In fact there's a great deal more information shown in the reference list in EndNote X – you can now view up to eight fields in the display, and click any column heading to sort and locate records quickly. That feature alone should save you a great deal of time, especially when you're working with large libraries.

Entering and editing references is also a lot easier and faster with EndNote X. You can decide whether to show or hide empty fields, to reduce scrolling through reference detail. A simple drop-down list of Reference Types on the menu bar lets you easily switch between views to add new data. Reference Type lists are now alphabetised so that selection is easier.

There are four new Reference Types in EndNote X: Ancient Text, a dedicated reference template for classical texts and manuscripts; Dictionary; Encyclopedia; and Grant. A minor annoyance has been addressed too: the Electronic Source Reference Type has been renamed Web Page – after all, what else will your electronic source be?

Then there are new options for searching EndNote libraries. For example, you can now search for items that “begin with” or “end with” specified fields or words. Many other enhancements improve the interface and workflow of EndNote.

Every new release of EndNote increases the software's flexibility by adding in new and updated connection files, import filters, output styles and manuscript templates. EndNote X now brings the total of connection files (the online resources you can directly connect to) to over 800; and there are now import filters for over 540 online databases. You can create bibliographies to meet the publishing requirements of over 2,300 journal styles; and there are over 135 manuscript templates for you to choose from. New updates are regularly posted on www.adeptscience.com for you to download, and if you still have a need that's not met by all these resources, EndNote lets you create your own.

The Windows version of EndNote X is released this month (June 2006) and the Macintosh version will follow later this summer. EndNote X is compatible with Microsoft Word 2007, and will also be fully compatible with EndNote Web – a Web-based reference management tool that will be released later this year.