This is probably of interest to a very small segment of our readers, but for that segment, it's exciting. Thomson ResearchSoft has finally released their flagship EndNote X bibliographic package for the Mac (PC users have had it for several months already), and I took it for a spin this weekend. The biggest changes are under the hood. EndNote X features a new compressed file format that allows libraries to be stored in less on-disk space. The compressed format also save libraries as single files, enabling easier sharing of libraries with your colleagues. Potentially more exciting, EndNote X features drag and drop management for embedded PDFs, so you can include articles right in your bibliographies. Combined with some stability and speed improvements, particularly combined with a shiny new universal binary, this makes for a very good upgrade. Thomson has added in some eye candy and other fun stuff, too. Most noticeable is a new set of aquafied icons, but if you go to the tools menu, you'll find that they've also added customizable menus to almost every window, as you can see in the full screenshot.
Retail is $239.95 or a $89.95 upgrade for current users. Many colleges and universities provide it free to students and faculty, so ask. A 30-day demo is available.
Read on for a full on screenshot.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
9-06-2006 @ 9:43AM
Sarah said...
Wow, this is great!
Yes, I am one of your minority of readers for whom this will be pertinent ... as a phd student, I need this to keep track of all the texts I wade through. I have an earlier version of Endnote and really enjoy it, but it is good to see that the few things that used to bug me have been fixed ... I'll have to harp on to my university to provide a licensed copy to students.
Oh, btw, as with every-increasingly larger programs, it's not a resource/ram hog over time is it in your experience with it?
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9-06-2006 @ 9:51AM
Jan said...
I am, for the moment, quite happy with the free app called BibDesk. What are the main reasons to switch to EndNote? Cheers.
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9-06-2006 @ 10:43AM
Wolfgang said...
Endnote for Mac has been VERY slow and buggy over the past few years. There are other Applications available (like Bookends and Sente) which offer the same features for much less money.
Furthermore, both Apps offer superb support!
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9-06-2006 @ 10:44AM
starwxrwx said...
Bibdesk is great. I use it even though my uni offers Endnote for free.
I only use LaTeX though!
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9-06-2006 @ 10:50AM
Jay Savage said...
Jan:
"Reasons to switch" is a matter of personal preference. But here's why I like EndNote:
1) BibDesk relies on BibTeX. BibTeX is uniformly awful for writing in the humanities. All of the MLA styles in CTAN are irreperably broken. They don't even handle page numbers in citations correctly (page number or range, no comma, no "p", no "pp").
2)Creating a style that works, generally is nearly impossible as the .bib file format is geared toward the sciences and some neccesary information must be shoved into custom fields and comments. Any time I've been forced to work with BibTex, I've ended up writing a custom parser in Perl to ahndle only the reference types I'm using in the paper. The MLS defines nrealy 1000 reference types, each of which are handled subtly differently.
3) BibDesk, so far as I know, only automatically loads files from PubMed, and then only after the files are downloaded. EndNote supports every research database I've ever heard of, and will open connections to most of them. In addition it will support any OPAC or other resource with a Z39.50 interface.
4) EndNote is one stop shopping for resouce management. External files can be embedded directly in records as objects, and as of v.X, there's drag-and-drop supoort for embedding images and PDFs.
5) It's the defacto standard at many research institutions. If you send off and EndNote .enl to a colleague, he or she can almost certainly open it and use it with a minimum of fuss, either on their own computer or at the campus library or faculty resource center. LaTex, OTOH, has wide purchace in Mathematics and a couple of sciences, but is virtually unknown in the rest of the academy.
6) EndNote integrates directly with MS Word, adding a citation menu and "Cite while you write" feature. It also supports scanning any text or RTF document for EndNote citation markup. That makes it much more versitle than BibTex, which will only scan text files and only produce Tex markup.
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9-06-2006 @ 11:28AM
Shawn said...
I just checked and my university is offering this for free starting Sept 15. This seems like a very very usefult piece of software.
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9-06-2006 @ 11:51AM
Josh Greenberg said...
Along these lines, the Center for History and New Media at GMU will soon be releasing a new Firefox extension that does bibliographic notetaking plus a whole lot more - keep an eye on http://www.zotero.org for more details...
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9-06-2006 @ 1:54PM
Joseph said...
I'm pretty happy with BookEnds, which already provides good facilities for handling pdfs. I was permanently turned off of Endnote by their horrible corporate behavior. I "upgraded" to Endnote 8 only to find it unuseable due to bugs. I patiently waited for the inevitable 8.01 version only to find that they never released one, although they did for the PC. Instead they released Endnote 9 and demanded another $300. I vowed never to use Endnote again and have not looked back. Bookends does everything I need and has excellent support and is much more reasonably priced.
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9-06-2006 @ 6:20PM
Jay Savage said...
The problem with all the EndNote replacements is they're either based in BibTex, which doesn't help people in the Humanities, or Mac-specific, which means they're no good for collaboration in a PC-centric world. Many of the people I share libraries with can barely manage typing entries, let alone figuring out how to import a CSV or XML file. As soon as Sente comes out with a PC version and support for the new compressed enl file type, I'll switch and recommend the U change the site license. Until then, it's the same old song. A "better" product is not always a more appropriate product, and vice versa. And v.X is a huge step in the right direction.
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9-06-2006 @ 8:43PM
Ronan Donohoe said...
Wouldnt it be great if all you had to do was show the bacode of a book / journal to your iSight camera and it automatically imported all the bibliographic info to save you typing? :)
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9-06-2006 @ 10:24PM
AHM said...
Endnote has gone from a well-supported product on the Mac to a bug-ridden mess regularly released months after the PC version. It appears that they are now on a one-release-a-year schedule regardless of advances; Endnote 9 was just Endnote 8 with bugfixes; and X's meager new "feature" list includes *renaming of menu commands*. Their proprietary .enl format and a lack of competition is what keeps them in business.
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9-07-2006 @ 9:18AM
Ronan said...
EndNote's "upgrades" come about once a year, making it a very expensive package to maintain. I've recently started using Sente, which is far cheaper, and has wonderful features like constantly updating your bibliography in the background so you can see what's new in the field.
EndNote's download times from PubMed are still painfully slow compared with either Sente or Bookends. And the interface is still really klunky.
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9-07-2006 @ 12:43PM
Mark said...
Comment 11 is spont on as are many others. What is even more frustrating is now the Endnote "upgrade" cycle will be completely out of sync with the universal version of Word. I've used Endnote for years and have forked over the $99 several times to maintain Word compatibility. I am convinced that they will be asking for more money in 8-9 months (they always lag behind the Word release, and they never never release free patches on the Mac side) simply to keep Word integration intact. Buyer beware.
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9-07-2006 @ 12:55PM
Gerald said...
I agree with the above criticism of EndNote. I was a user of it since version 1, but gave up on it around version 7 because of bugs, crappy Mac support relative to PC version, and high upgrade cost. I remember chatting with an EndNote rep at a Macworld conference about finally building in support for Japanese and Chinese characters (which it now finally has) and his response was that the market for it would be too small -- "only ex-pats living in Japan". Totally clueless. He had no idea of the numbers of academics working in these languages in the States and elsewhere. I felt insulted and basically said screw you to the whole operation.
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9-09-2006 @ 1:41PM
Bruce said...
I'd second the "watch for Zotero" suggestion. This—and hopefully an ecosystem of tools like it that can interoperate—is finally going to be the nail in the Endnote coffin. It has a better data model and GUI, and is standards-based, cross-platform, and open source. I'm betting it's only a matter of time before someone implements a OS X citation processing service that can tie into it.
On that note, if you care about citations in OS X, let Apple know. The technical underpinnings are there to have system level citations objects and processing, so that you no longer must choose one editor or bibliographic database. But if customers don't ask for it, they won't implement it.
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10-06-2006 @ 4:42PM
Tim Pasch said...
Endnote has become an important aspect of my research, and I have taken to inputting quotes and entire elements of an article into the "Notes" field, for rapid retrieval in an examination situation. The fact that .pdf files can now be embedded is an important new feature.
As previously mentioned however, Thompson continually charges the same price for new academic users as for long-time academic version upgraders. The boxed upgrade to version X for version 9 users is 99.95. (new users pay $109.95 at my University). In my mind the $10 discount even after having bought several versions in the past is just an absolute insult. I will probably pay the money, but I am very interested in a program that will read and convert endnote files that I can eventually use as a replacement. Either Thompson works harder on customer retention or I will jump ship at the earliest possible opportunity. Here is the headline from the upgrade page:
Download your EndNote Upgrade Online and Save $10 off the boxed upgrade of $99.95! (so the upgrade can actually go as low as 89.95 for a download). still way overpriced.
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