Using and Evaluating EndNote
For my evaluation, I chose to look at EndNote, a reference management software currently produced by Clarivate. The earliest versions of the software date as far back as the mid-1990s, and until recently, it was produced by Thomson Reuters. For my evaluation, though, I deliberately chose to look at the latest version of the software, EndNote 20, which was released in December of last year. While UNC students, faculty, and staff can purchase a license to this version of EndNote via UNC’s IT Software Distribution, it costs $65, so I decided to use my Duke credentials to acquire a license at no cost via Duke’s Software Licensing service. I am not used to using resource managers like EndNote—I have dipped my toes in Zotero but only very briefly—so I found myself a little intimidated by the prospect of figuring it out. After tinkering with it for a few hours, however, and reading and watching some tutorials, I think I have gotten a sufficient idea of where its major strengths and weaknesses lie. Since I have such sparse experience with resource managers in general, however, I feel it is necessary to note that I cannot be sure how well the strengths and weakness I am perceiving stack up against similar software like Zotero, RefWorks, or Mendeley. To this end, it will be interesting to read the contributions of others in this class.[1]
Before proceeding further, too, I should note that most of my observations derive from my use of the software’s desktop version. While there is a web-based version of the software, EndNote Online, it does not offer all of the features present in the desktop version (perhaps most importantly, the software’s helpful applications in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint), and in my experience, navigation of EndNote Online is not as fluid or intuitive as navigation in the desktop version. Further, while you can make an Online account without purchasing the software and ostensibly use it that way, doing this even more heavily limits your access to EndNote’s features (to the point where I could not find it particularly useful in any substantive way).[2] The fullest and most intuitive use thus appears to take place in the desktop version of the software, which requires purchase or institutional access. This, I think, limits its versatility; while an individual’s EndNote license can be applied to up to three different devices, and therefore use by multiple computers is technically possible, truly doing so in a productive way would ideally involve installing the full desktop version on all of these devices, which would likely pose some practical challenges (especially if the devices vary in type, such as if you wanted to use EndNote on your PC as well as your Mac).
Another major weakness I encountered in my exploration of EndNote pertains to group work and the potential for social interaction with other users, features which we were instructed to look out for in this assignment. EndNote appears to be rather limited in this area. While you have the option to share your collected groups of references with up to 100 other people, they must have, at a minimum, an EndNote Online account. If you wish to share your group with someone who lacks an EndNote Online account, you can send them an email using the software inviting them to make an EndNote Online account. While you thankfully do not need to purchase the full version of EndNote to see a reference group that someone has chosen to share with you, the mere requirement of creating an EndNote Online account still poses something of a barrier. Further hampering the ability to share work with others is EndNote’s general incompatibility with Cloud storage, which the EndNote website acknowledges:
Dropbox is a cloud based file sharing service. Our database products (EndNote, Reference Manager and ProCite) were not designed for compatibility with this service or other cloud storage. While you can use the service to keep a backup copy or share a compressed copy of your database file(s), we do not recommend opening and/or using the database from that location. If you have your database files saved to Dropbox or any cloud storage, we recommend you copy the files to another location on your computer or remote drive before you open them. ("EndNote, Reference Manager, & ProCite: Compatibility with Dropbox and other Cloud storage," n.d.)
Thus, while it is technically possible to share your work in EndNote with others using Cloud storage like Dropbox or Google Drive, doing so could be risky, especially if you are still actively trying to use EndNote in the document you are storing in the Cloud. With these facts in mind, then, I would generally consider the state of EndNote’s shareability to be a weakness.
One final significant weakness that I noticed in my personal use of EndNote is its seeming mechanical instability. Throughout my afternoon of exploring EndNote’s desktop version, I found that it crashed several times, especially when I was trying to complete different tasks in it simultaneously. There could be a number of reasons why these crashes occurred, and it is highly likely that they had little or nothing to do with any serious flaw in the software itself; my computer is, frankly, in poor condition following years of heavy use, and it is not unusual for certain kinds of software to crash on it. Thus, it might seem trivial to bring this up as a weakness. However, practically speaking, I am aware that it is not uncommon for graduate students in particular to hold onto their devices for as long as possible owing to expense. A number of EndNote users may find themselves in similar technological circumstances to myself, and so I do think it is worth noting that the software appears prone to crashing, at least on devices that are not in ideal condition (I would be curious to see if this is true for other devices more broadly; a cursory Google search indicates that EndNote can often cause Word to crash, but I personally did not experience this).
Despite these weaknesses, however, I generally found the major functions of EndNote to be both useful and fairly simple to navigate. As someone who, again, has limited experience with resource managers in general, EndNote’s seven minute YouTube tutorial was a helpful way to get acquainted with the software’s basic functions (“How to use EndNote 20 in seven minutes: Windows,” 2020). The feature which most impressed me was EndNote's general proficiency at locating the full text (either a pdf which could be viewed within the software, or a URL to the full text) of the references I added to my library (most of which were humanities-related scholarly articles). This was closely followed by its numerous uses in Word (referred to in the user guide as “Cite While You Write with Microsoft Word”); inserting citations from EndNote into Word was fairly intuitive, and I appreciated that the insert provided both the in-text and the full citation of each reference. I also liked how it was quite simple to change up the citation style within Word itself, and the breadth of citation styles offered. Helpfully, too, I learned that it was possible to reformat and update EndNote citations in one’s Word document even if the EndNote library from which the citations were inserted is not available to the document’s user; the EndNote user guide describes this as the “traveling library” feature:
A Traveling Library allows you to reformat references in your Word document even when your EndNote library is not available. If you are collaborating with other authors, you can rely on the Traveling Library to supply reference information. (“Overview of the Cite While You Write Process in Word,” n.d.)
Though I still count EndNote’s general shareability as one of its weaker points, this particular feature, which makes sharing a Word document with EndNote citations among collaborators simpler (especially if the collaborators do not have EndNote themselves), does help redeem it in this regard. One final strength, I feel, is the general ease of importing citations from online sources into EndNote. I successfully imported a number of citations into EndNote from several sources, including a few scholarly databases, Duke’s library catalog, and the Duke Libraries’ online articles search. The only confusion that occurred over the course of this step in the process happened when I occasionally struggled to find the citation export feature within each source, but this confusion was always only momentary and had nothing to do with EndNote itself. Sorting imported references within EndNote, too, was also fairly simple (though, had I not seen the YouTube tutorial, it might not have occurred to me that I could simply drag and drop references in order to sort them).
With all these weaknesses and strengths in mind, then, I would say that I generally found EndNote to be quite usable. While I remain unenthused by reference management software in general, this experience helped me realize how software such as EndNote could help me stay more organized in my research. I think it is fairly likely that I will continue to attempt using it, now that I feel generally proficient in its major functions.
References
Buy EndNote (n.d.). EndNote. Retrieved November 28, 2021, from https://buy.endnote.com/1603/purl-buy
EndNote (n.d.). Duke University Software Licensing. Retrieved November 28, 2021, from https://software.duke.edu/node/75
EndNote (n.d.). UNC Information Technology Services. Retrieved November 28, 2021, from https://software.sites.unc.edu/software/endnote/
EndNote, Reference Manager, & ProCite: Compatibility with Dropbox and other Cloud storage (2018, August 16). Clarivate. Retrieved November 28, 2021, from https://support.clarivate.com/Endnote/s/article/EndNote-Reference-Manager-ProCite-Compatibility-with-Dropbox-and-other-Cloud-storage?language=en_US
“Overview of the Cite While You Write Process in Word” (n.d.). EndNote user guide. Used within desktop version of EndNote on November 28, 2021
Which reference manager to choose? Zotero, Mendeley, or Endnote (2020). Reddit. Retrieved November 28, 2021, from https://www.reddit.com/r/PhD/comments/jqd5dg/which_reference_manager_to_choose_zotero_mendeley/
[1] I was very curious as to how people felt about EndNote, though, both generally and as it compares to other resource managers, so I ended up looking through some relevant Reddit threads to hear what people were saying about it in an unfiltered way. I’m including a link to one of these threads in my references.
[2] To get a fuller idea of the Web experience, I made two separate EndNote accounts: one, which I made with my Duke credentials, gave me the fullest Web version possible (since I had already downloaded the software from Duke) and the other, which I made with my UNC credentials, gave me the Web version you get when you have not purchased the software. I am basing my observations here on these contrasting experiences.
I have neither given nor received aid while working on this assignment. I have completed the graded portion BEFORE looking at anyone else's work on this assignment. Signed Anna Twiddy