Crandon Services

Of course, the first thing that you must do is to begin building your database, or "library", of references. Open EndNote and instruct it to open a new library file, which you name and store as usual on your disk drive. Then specify a new reference, and an editing screen will appear with blank fields to be "filled in" for the appropriate bibliographic data - author(s), date, title etc.

EndNote recognises a wide variety of different reference types - journal articles, books, book sections, edited books, newspaper or magazine articles, conference proceedings, theses etc. - and presents appropriate fields for each type. If you don't like EndNote's default reference types, or the default fields provided for them, you can easily modify them or add new ones to meet your own specifications.

You begin by selecting the appropriate type for the new reference (e.g. Journal Article, Book, Book Section etc.;) and enter data for the first field (e.g. author name(s)). Press TAB, and enter data for the next field (e.g. article title), and so on. Systematic entry in this fashion minimises the risk of overlooking important information. You can type or paste in lengthy abstracts and/or annotations if you wish..EndNote version 8 onwards have no restriction to the library size and are now unicode compliant.

Once entered, references are displayed in abbreviated form in a list window, in which they can be sorted on any of the displayed fields (up to 8 of them) by simply clicking on the corresponding column head, and any desired reference(s) can easily be located. Mouse-clicking on a reference in this window at any time produces another scrollable window in which full details of the reference are displayed.

You decide which of the references you wish to cite at any point in your document text (including two or more references at one point, if appropriate). Then you can simply select and insert that/those reference(s) in your word processor document at the current cursor position.

EndNote will automatically place what it calls "temporary" (unformatted) citation(s) at the word processor cursor position (you don't need to type them, although you can if you wish) and you can carry on with your writing. Temporary citations are used to hold information about each reference in the text until you decide on how you want them finally formatted. They are normally enclosed in curly braces (you can use other marker characters if you wish), and each one contains the (first) author's surname, the year of publication, and the record number of that reference in your EndNote library - enough information for EndNote to find that reference in your library file.

If you are using EndNote's Cite-While-You-Write ("CWYW") feature and an appropriate word processor you can also initiate a search of your reference library from within the word processor and insert found citations directly into your document from the Search dialog.

With later versions of EndNote (and an appropriate word processor) you need only select your formatting style in EndNote and without leaving the word processor issue a "Format bibliography" command (by a simple menu selection or shortcut key). Citations are automatically formatted, and your bibliography updated.

You can always return to your manuscript, add, delete or modify citations, and re-format - even in a different style. Maybe Science rejects your great work, and you decide to send it to Nature instead. You will need to re-format both the in-text citations and the complete bibliography to accord with the different "rules" for the different journal, and this can be a very tedious manual task. With EndNote, you just select the Nature style, and tell EndNote to re-scan the document to generate a new manuscript formatted in the new style. No re-typing or re-entry of data at all - just tell EndNote to re-format and it will do the whole job in seconds!