Hi everyone.

I've just started my PhD, and have had a talk on Endnote. It covered how to use it at a basic level, but didn't really show us how people generally use it, if that makes sense. I have a couple of questions, and would be really grateful if someone could provide any answers (I'm a medical science PhD if that makes a difference)...

1. Do people generally use Endnote to search for papers, or do they use medline/pubmed etc to search, and then copy over any papers they're interested in?

2. Is there a way of adding some kind of notes to Endnote entries, so that you can remember what you've read where?

3. Do you generally put any potentially interesting papers in Endnote, and then decide what to read, or do you only put into Endnote the ones you're definitely going to read, making it a library of what you've read rather than anything which might be useful?


Once again, many thanks for any answers to these!

Matt :-)

I think it depends how you write. I use endnote as I go, using google scholar to find references as I need them, as I long discovered that trying to read and then write is hopeless for me!

there are research note fields you can add to - I find that ordering my references in to categories helps, ones for each area of research.

Hi Matt
I'm in the very early stages of my phd too and I find Endnote really useful.
What I have done is made various groups based on the different topics I read. But I also have a more groups named " ???-read papers" so basically as I read papers, I drag them into these groups. Each paper can belong to many groups so there's no hassle there. So all of the papers that I have downloaded whether read or unread are in my Endnote library anf using the groups function I can organise them. Hope this makes some sense!!
ps. I search for papers through Google Scholar/SciencDirect and import the citations from there.

Hi 4matt

I would recommend you simply use endnote as a reference manager

Any papers you want to read, or even are considering reading I would either print, or save as PDF

Then, when you come to write something for the first time, I recommend you only put the details you need for the reference, i.e. title, author, year published, journal etc into endnote programme. A colleage of mine did the whole import journal plus abstract and link to journal thing from web of science, In the end the file got too big and crashed endnote and he lost a lot of the information.

You may be ok if you are running a newer version, and he had imported over 200 references this way, but I would recommend just having the minimum of info in endnote and use it as a reference manager, whilst saving any papers you may want to read as PDFs

I have a love/hate relationship with endnote, and have relegated it to one of my (many) places to store my reference list. some people can get it to do all sorts of wonderful things, but it isn't my favourite bit of kit, partly perhaps because unless I go in and alter the settings it isn't going to give me the refs in the way I need them. On the other hand it is good if you want to publish somewhere where they need a different format. - on this point I have made sure I record not just the initials, but full names and middle initial, you may need these for some publications, although not for all. some people here have had problems with using hte 'cite while you write' function as it wouldn't give them what they needed, or gave them too much in some cases. If I were you, and was thinking of using it, I would have a dummy run to make sure you know how it will work for you, so when you get down to work you will be familiar with it. One other thing, make sure you keep at least one other copy of your ref list, preferably several, there would be nothing worse than entrusting it with your only source of this - computers know these things and will, at some critical point, refuse to work properly! :$