How do you organise your endnote files? Do you keep separate endnote libraries? I am planning to have the one library for writing up the thesis. I want to number the articles to correspond to the hard copies as this might help me to be better organised, everything at the moment is all over the place! Could anyone tell me how to number your articles? Many thanks

I kept one (pretty big...) endnote library and put in a hard copy file code under one of the bits that's not used - I used 'Label' to put the codes and 'alternate journal' sometimes to tag articles I wanted to pull out as a collection. My codes were letters (one or two) for subjects then numbers for plastic wallets. I found that no matter how you organise it - it will be an imperfect system with cross-references all over the place and once you have a code in place you have to stick with it or change the whole lot. It doesn't matter what kind of crazy code you have though as long as it works for you.

Bulbs - Two or three ways of doing it, but quickly
1. If using latest version of EndNote (X2), you can actually create groups (either manually or dynamically i.e. using specific keyword searches ... something akin to using SQL in a database). This allows you to create groups but still have the option of having the same record as part of another group. But beware - if updating to X2 it has been known to cause problems so please backup your ref. library on at least one external location i.e. store the relevant .enl library on a USB stick or post it to your own email account. The main problem with updating from an older version of EN is that you have to delete ALL traces of the older software
2. If you have a ref. type you know you will not use, you could modify one of the field names to become an "Area" field and then you could use this to label the record. Then you can sort the entire record using this.

Long story short is that it is possible and is worth taking a few hours to sort (saves you months later). I am sorry for the meandering but am still under the weather. If you wish for more details, have no hassles contacting me. Not really in favour of having different libraries for different sections as gets messy.

Also and possibly ironically, there is a forum on the Thompson website for EN users. http://forums.thomsonscientific.com/ts/board?board.id=en-general

Lastly, remember to backup your EN library regularly ... in updating to X2 last week, I nearly lost the whole lot :-s

I have one library that seems to 'fit-all' ok; can't really see the point in having separate libraries. I do keep a back-up library on my memory stick though, just in case.