Software review: EndNote 4 ISI ResearchSoft
Andy Boze · Information Technology and Libraries · 2000
ISI ResearchSoft [email protected], 800 Jones St. Berkeley, CA 94710 (510) 559-8592 Price: $210 retail full version, $100 student price or upgrade from 3.0 Minimum system requirements for Apple Macintosh: OS 7.5.5 or later, Power PC, 11 MB hard drive, 6 MB RAM, CD-ROM drive. Minimum system requirements for PCs: Intel 486 processor or higher, Windows 95/98/ NT4/2000, 13 MB hard drive, 16 MB RAM, CD-ROM drive. You're searching your favorite online research database to collect references for your latest paper. You export a couple of dozen reference citations, which you might use in the paper, and easily import them into a database designed especially for storing references. As you're writing your paper, you effortlessly insert coded citations into your document with a click of the mouse or a tap of a key. You've finished your paper and the coded citations properly format themselves for the scholarly journal or popular style of your choice. Your document then generates a properly formatted bibliography of your citations all with a click of the mouse or a tap of another key--no messing around with proper spacing, indentation, bold, italics, underlining, etc. ISI ResearchSoft's EndNote 4 does all of this for you and much more. EndNote rightly finds itself at the top of a small list of popular programs in the reference management software application genre, with a price tag to match. You can think of EndNote as an electronic card catalog stored on your computer. Your references are kept in an EndNote Library, an easy to use database with a simple interface designed for storing any sort of reference one might find. EndNote lets you specify the type of source from twenty-three built-in Reference Types, such as book, journal article, and thesis, and three custom undefined types. In your EndNote Library, you can easily sort and search your references, and save your complex Boolean search parameters for later use. From the Library window, you can also create new references and delete old ones, import references from text files, and export your entire collection or a subset in many different file formats and hundreds of output styles. EndNote 4 currently offers output styles for 534 scholarly publications and database standards, such as tab- and comma-delimited. It further lets you export your references in plain text format, rich text format for preserving style, formatting, and special punctuation, and HTML format to facilitate quick and easy publication on the Web. You can easily search for and discard duplicate references in your Library, preview a highlighted reference in the selected output style, and execute textual find and replace commands across a subset or the entire Library. Double clicking a reference opens the Reference window, within which you can easily edit any reference information and even create links from a reference to files on your computer or on the Web. EndNote also features the Terms List, which indexes the Author, Journal, and Keywords fields by default. The Terms Lists allow for automatic text completion when typing the same name or word in one field over and over. With so many wonderful and convenient features, EndNote would be a great product if it stopped right there, but there's much more. Saving search results from an online research database and importing them into EndNote is not a dream. EndNote would be little more than a specialized database if it demanded that you manually enter every reference into your Library. Consequently, it ships with filters for over two hundred online research indexes from the most popular information providers, like OCLC FirstSearch, SilverPlatter, DIALOG Online, Knowledge Index, Ovid, etc. Most electronic resources allow you to export your search results in various formats. Using the supplied filters or ones you create yourself, EndNote can read the exported results and import them into your Library. If an electronic resource does not offer an EndNote-friendly export format, or if you already have an existing bibliography on file or a spreadsheet of citations, EndNote offers a few other simple ways to get those references into your Library. …