Special EndNote tips & tricks!

Here are a couple of really good tips, tricks and workarounds from LibraryFit. These will come in handy when working with EndNote and provide solutions for problems you may encounter along the way.

Direct export using the Macintosh

This will work with Firefox as the browser, but not with Safari. Firefox will give you the option to open the file, and will ask which program you wish to use. Select EndNote as the program.

Word processor compatibility

In response to user demand, backwards compatibility has been improved, and EndNote X3 is compatible with Word 2000 and Open Office.

Direct export from Google Scholar

This will work better if you go into the Scholar Preferences, go to the Bibliography Manager settings, and select RefMan instead of EndNote. When you do your search, you will now see links "Import into RefMan". Click on these links and the references will import directly to EndNote.

Find Full Text

If you are not working in the biomedical area, find full text will work more quickly in EndNote X3 if you go to the Preferences>Find Full Text, and uncheck the "Pubmed Link Out" option. Certain databases have licensing agreements which prohibit use of the find full text feature. These include Ebsco, JSTOR, Swets.

EndNote Web

Version 2.8 is in beta and should be released soon. The ability to insert references into a Word document from a folder which another user has shared with you should be available next year [but they have been saying this for a while!] This problem with shared folders is significant for students who want to use EndNote for group projects. It is suggested as a workaround that one of the students should get a new email account (from Gmail, Yahoo, or wherever) and then set up a new EndNote Web account. The username and password can then be given to all the group.

Locating a Corrupt Citation in a Word Document

The normal procedure when dealing with possible corruption is to unformat the citations. A corrupt citation will not unformat. But how do you pick up an unformatted citation in a lengthy document? Go to the Word preferences for "Field shading." Change the setting from "When selected" to "Always." Now you can scan through the document and look for greyed areas of text. This way you can more easily pick up the corrupt citations which failed to unformat.

Dealing with a Corrupt Word Document

If the user is able to open a new Word document and insert EndNote citations correctly, then the corruption is probably limited to the document that they are working on. Click on the "backwards P" symbol on the Word toolbar to display all the hidden formatting symbols. Copy the document, except for the final paragraph symbol (the "backwards P" again). Paste it into a new document. Can you now insert citations correctly? In corrupt documents, the corruption is often contained in that final paragraph symbol. If the document is divided by section breaks, there can also be corruption in a particular section. The same procedure applies: copy the document section by section, omitting the final paragraph mark in each section.

Word’s Normal Template is Corrupt

If the user opens a new Word document, but is unable to insert EndNote citations correctly, then the default Word template (the "normal" template) may be corrupt. To fix this, first close Word. Go to Windows Explorer and make sure that you have set the Folder Options so that you can view hidden files and folders. Then locate the normal template (in the MicrosoftTemplates folder under the Application Data). It will be called "normal.dot" or "normal.dotm". Remove this file from that folder and save it somewhere else. It contains all the preferences for Word, so don’t delete it at this point: just move it elsewhere. Also, look for any temporary files in that folder with names beginning ~$. Delete these. Now restart Word. Word will recreate the normal template (without any of the preferences). Does this fix the EndNote problem? If not, you should close Word, go back to the templates folder, delete the new normal template and retrieve the old normal template. This will restore your Word preferences. Of course, it won’t fix the EndNote problem.

Doing a Clean Reinstall of EndNote

Uninstalling EndNote from Control Panel will not remove all EndNote files from your computer. Sometimes you need to delete all the files, especially if you want to delete the preferences.

EndNote files may still be present in these locations:

* an EndNote folder in the Documents area
* an EndNote folder in your Application Data
* in the Program Files/Common Files/ResearchSoft folder
* in the Program Files/Common Files/Thomson ResearchSoft folder
* in the Program Files/EndNote… folder

You also have to run regedit to open the Registry Editor and delete the EndNote folder under: HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareISI ResearchSoft

Now restart Windows.
Then reinstall EndNote.

If you have any questions about the tips above or other EndNote issues, feel free to contact me.

Want to know more about EndNote X3?
Or any updates of the EndNote program?