Customer Reviews

Endnote Student Edition 7.0

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There are big *UNRESOLVED* compatibility issues with Word 2003. The "Cite While You Write" feature doesn't work, which is a big deal. Don't be fooled by the endnote.com Web site--their seemingly easy fix doesn't work.

Don't believe me? Do a quick Internet search on Endnote 7 and Word 2003 compatibility. Many have had problems.

After agonizing with the problem of managing numerous references for scientific papers, someone clued me in to this product. I bought it last year, and immediately felt like a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

It has several helpful features.
1. You can download references directly into your Endnote library. With a lit search it's nothing to find 10 or 20 references you want to add to your bibliography. Endnote has info on hundreds of common databases telling you how to download directly into your library. For me it was fast and removed almost all tedium from the process. It *almost* made it fun.

2. Cite as you write. MS Word's built-in citation managing features should be called suck-as-you-write. With Endnote you simply click on Tools Menu-Endnote-Find Citation. Just enter the author's name and it will automatically put the citation in your paper. And if you make major edits and rearrange paragraphs, Endnote tracks all your changes so you don't have to renumber all the references. That would be murder if you were writing say a book chapter with 200 references. Likewise, if you edit your library, those changes also carry into your papers linked to that library.

3. When you are done and ready to print, you can choose from hundreds of formats to output to e.g. American Psych Assoc, or whatever. You can select your desired in-text reference format (e.g. superscript number, or [author,year]), and also how the bibliography section of your document is organized. If your journal isn't in Endnote's database you can custom make one, or check their website for updates. You can chose to save a version of your paper that totally removes all your endnote-specific formatting so it's just a simple word document that anyone can access and edit.

A word (no pun intended) about the previous comments about it not being compatible with Word 2003. I just got Word 2003, and true there is a fix you have to get from the Endnote website. Basically, copy 2 files from the Endnote folder into Word's startup folder, and then open Endnote before Word in a particular way so the registry path is correct. It was pretty easy, but I can see how it might be tricky for a novice, like my dad.

Apparently Endnote has some figure/image managing features which I did not look into. Most publications I'd submit to want your figures separate anyway. The one thing I did find useful about the "image" heading in the library was to put the PDF of your journal article there, although you have to manually do this.

So I'm pleased. It is a time and labor saving piece of software that doesn't suck. I hope you agree.

This is an excellent piece of software. For trying to keep on top of all those references for a thesis it really does take a lot of the work away. Well worth it, and integrated well with the databases that I needed to search.