Customer Reviews

for Student Use Only Endnote X2 Student Edition Win

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EndNote has not resolved a problem with a file that is generated when it is installed and used: "cwyw.dot". If you read the user's forum on the EndNote site you will see numerous comments about having problems with the "cwyw.dot" files. It can cause your MSWord to hang-up and just freeze. The corrections that EndNote lists on its website are not adequate fixes.

Be careful about purchasing software that has not been fully engineered. This is one of them.

Version X2 was a bit slow until the recent patch. Now it is faster, although it takes awhile to load the first time. It takes a short while to learn all of the features, but well worth it. Customer service is excellent (rare these days)!

You can get bibilographical information from your university library (or Library of Congress, or one of hundreds of other sources) online and create an organized data base of all your resources. You can then arrange your books and articles and other publications according to your groups that you set up: (e.g. Available in Library, PDF file Available, Need to order via Interlink Library System, etc) so that you can make your research work as efficient as possible.

Endnote makes it easy to automatically insert citations according to your prefered style (Chicago 15th, MLA, or one of thousands of others) and automatically create a bibliography, saving many hours of tedious labor.

Well worth the price!

As a long time user of EndNote, I am very dissappointed with the updated version of the program. In previous iterations all of the references were based in a single library and it was easy to find, manipulate and download references. While it was difficult to generate and export groups for individual documents, it was managable. Now everything is based on groups and downloading references directly into your main library is a pain where references seem to disappear into the ether on occassion. The program is still extremely useful, but this newer version is another fine example of excessive modification into a less intuitive program that makes the most commonly used tasks very difficult. They have obviously been taking lessons from Microsoft.

This is a very good product although the user interface is dated and somewhat lacking with respect to window candy, menu styles, and menu customization. The software focuses on the technical aspect of citation management and formatting and performs that job extremely well covering very many citation formats. Importing from web sites works very well from online databases although there are times that the coding of the authors' names is backwards i.e. first name comes out as last name. This package also comes with a PDA database application so you can carry it with you and sync later to your computer. User beware that one should check references formatted for correct capitalization, etc. as it cannot do everything without some human checking. The user should be familiar with the formatting method and refer to a text for the correct rules.

Formats can be created from the existing list of reference styles to make reference formats such as APA annotated bibliographies and annotated references. The software allows logical storage of references through custom groups. This is an excellent tool for researchers from high school on up through doctoral programs as it has many tools that will grow with you as you progress as a researcher. I use it as my reference note taker for my doctoral research and I wish I knew about this years ago as it would have saved me a lot of time.

The only issue that I have is that it interfaces with Word and is very slow to start when Word is activated and closes when you leave Word. There may be a fix for this but I have not investigated. This is a minor issue as my time spent writing and referencing is way more than the start up time factor.

The bottom line, if you are into research, this is an excellent package for reference management and citation insertion into documents. It has wide-spread linkages with most online databases such as EBSCOHost and ProQuest and to many library links built into the software. It allows for attachment of documents into the database either through insertion into the database or references to locations on your hard-drive. At this point, I can not do without its usefulness.