June 05, 2006

• I hire a midget to do such tedious tasks. I suggest you do the same.
• I go with www.noodletools.com and it saved a lot of wasted time on my last research paper.
• Which version are you using? I heard that Endnote 8 sucked bad, but they eliminated a lot of the bugs for Endnote 9. But not being able to use it, I can't say for sure. However, our management has told us to encourage students to use it. *starts having second thoughts*
• It wouldn't do a standard academic French reference for me, so I binned it.
• Ugh. I tried using that piece of crap back when I was writting my thesis (defended in 2000). Yeah, totally gave up on it. It was easier to just keep cross-references in a notebook, and type it all in the end . . . and my thesis involved GIS and RS, and was pretty tech and database heavy. Of course, that was quite a long time ago, as far as computer programs are concerned.
• Everyone I've heard mention this product says it's a pile of shit. I've never used it, though.
• I'm still using endnote 7, since 8 was such a disaster. Once the dissertation is defended this summer, I'll switch to something else or go back to doing them by hand. There is nothing that seems to handle Canadian legal citation style properly. I've got a massive hack going that sort of works, but in retrospect it really wasn't worth the effort.
• I'm not at all familiar with what this is or what it is suppossed to do. Why can't you just use Word? Serious inquiry.
• Yeah, I'm with Berek. I have to cite according to the GSA Bulletin guidelines, and it never warrants special software.
• Supposedly, EndNote saves you time when you write your citations and your bibliographies for papers. You put in the information once in a form, then you can put that information into whatever the format should be (MLA, Chicago, Canadian Legal Citation, whatever) correctly so you don't have to fiddle with the commas and periods and other finicky bits. I used EndNote on my dissertation because the bibliography ended up being something like 20 pages long, but I'm not sure if I saved more time (and brain cells) by messing with EndNote. EndNote does what it's supposed to, but there's always a struggle involved.
• I'd go auld skul on ya and recommend BibTeX, but the learning curve is probably too great if you don't already know TeX/LaTeX. (Also, I have not used these bibliography tools that others are suggesting, so I suspect that BibTeX and related programs do not offer what you want.)
• What faculty would you have to change your citation style frequently with? In Arch all I've been using for years is American Antiquity style. Of course, the longest reference section I've had this far has been 5 pages. Still, typing out those last few pages is so goddamn satisfying that I wouldn't want to deprive myself of the sense of accomplishment. (Before the editing process kills me, of course.)
• If you're planning to actually enter academia, I'll go further than crataegus and recommend LaTeX and BibTeX. It's completely fucking awesome. I just type more or less normally. You just put \cite{mnemonic} commands where the cites go, in the simplest version. I'm utterly anal about mnemonics -- they're always authoryear -- so I don't even have to check which ones are already entered in my data file. I just put in all my cites, and BibTeX tells me that it doesn't have foo and bar. I never have anything in my references that I didn't cite, and I never have any citations that aren't in my references. Shifting reference format is as simple as changing the \bibliographystyle{}. The LaTeX world is very different from a word processing world and takes some getting used to, but it's not actually hard. As to spell checking, that's an editor job and you can use any editor that pleases you with LaTeX. Hell, you could even use Word. Did I mention that LaTeX and BibTeX are completely 100% free gratis? auld skul fuckin' a.
• I will type your notes up for an unreasonable fee.
• BibTeX is great... if you're in science. If you're in arts it won't do it for you, due to the need for footnote citations, etc. (I'd be happy to be proved wrong on this, but this is what I've been told) I use biblioscape. I really like it. My dad did some looking around into this a few years ago, found that biblioscape was, at the time, by far the best program, and became quite friendly with the guy who wrote it.
• I used a Word Macro, if I remember correctly. Now, of course, I would use OpenOffice, which has its very own bibliography database. Nat having used it, I wouldn't know how useful it is.
• Dreadnought: You mean like footbib does? (check your install, it should already have it)
• Dreadnought: The jurabib package defines a \footcite{} command which DTRT I believe. Jurabib is described as "enabling automated citation with BIBTEX for legal studies and the humanities." See the documentation for the gory details. The footbib bibliography style & opcit package are also possibilities.
• Thanks guys.
• Huh - I used Endnote for my thesis and loved it. I also used Refman just recently (they bought Endnote I believe) and it seemed fine. *shrug* I guess I'm not sure why you are spellchecking in Endnote - I would have inserted all the references into, say, Word and used its spellchecker. But for importing, maintaining and citing the databases I used, Endnote was da bomb. Berek- citing footnotes and endnotes in Word used to be a great way to destroy your work. Word would randomly decide to renumber and reformat your citations and annihilate however many days worth of effort you had put in. It would also corrupt backups, so no going back to a known good copy. It may still do so, I've no idea. Endnote is/was a great way to import literature searches and then insert them in Word. Endnote had a plugin that was Word compatible: you would just insert an Endnote placeholder while writing, and then tell Endnote to format the Word document in the correct citation style once you were done. Endnote also made it easy to unformat then reformat in a different style - if, say, you suddenly decided to submit to a different journal.
• Endmotes, footnotes, Pff! Pff I say! Why, when I was a student, we used good old fashioned plagiarism. The profs expected it, nay demanded it! We used the time we saved to sleep with them. Everyone was happy! Now you kids come in with your scruples and handy software tools and expect the rest of us to live up to your standards! Hurry up and finish your precious endnotes so that I may spit on them!
• My current series of problems with Endnote comes from the fact that I'm doing an independent study and the prof suggested that I put everything I read into Endnote. As part of the independent study I'm doing an annotated bibliography and so I wrote the annotations in Endnote itself. Normally, I would just export the entries to word and then spell check, but, the whole reason I used Endnote was so that in the future if I ever want to use any of these sources I will already have them and already have them annotated. Which, for those wondering what the point of Endnote is, I suppose that is the point. You input the info once and if you are dilligent you putin everything you read and when it comes time to write a paper, you have notes on all the things you've read and if you write papers for a living, then you will use the same sources over and over. (Wow, super-run-on!) So endnote is supposed to save time, but every time I've tried to use it, I've spend hours and hours trying to get it to work. This latest fiasco I was finally able to solve by remembering that unix and unix-like systems have a dictionary file which is just a text file full of words. I imported that, and now the spellcheck seems useable. However, that illistrates my problem. Why the hell should I have to remember about that unix file, hunt it down, and import it to make one of the features useable? Moreover, even once I remembered the unix dictionary, it still took a good hour to figure out how to import it. In the dictionary settings there is an "add file" setting. You do that and it shows the meager dictionary files that come with endnote and are in some .tlx format. Now there is also a dropdown for .dic and .txt files. So I would try that and either nothing would seem to happen, so i couldn't tell if it actually added the file, or I would get some random error. So, back to google to look around to see if anyone else was having this problem. Then finally, I noticed that there was an "import" button in a totally different area of the dictionary screen. So I use it to try to import the dictionary and the program locks up. Not sure if it actually crashed or just thinking (my harddrive is not being accessed, so i suspect it is locked up), I just leave it. Then five minutes later, it finally wakes up and is useable. Thanks endnote! Then, of course, there is the actual importing of references. More and more publishers are making endnote compatible citations for articles available on their websites. You download the little file and, at least in my case, spend an hour trying to get endnote to import it. It has 8 different options in the dropdown menu for how to import it and if you pick the wrong one, you get nothing. Endnote doesn't tell you it fails, doesn't give an error. You get nothing. So you have to look around to see if the entry is there. No? Try the next option. Repeat 7 more times and then just say fuck it and type it in by hand. So people keep telling me how useful this thing is and I keep trying it and keep finding myself wasting hour upon hour on trying to get it to work. Since people keep telling me to try it, I suppose there MUST be something usefull about it, but I'll be damned if I can find it. So, of course, I wonder if it is just me, if I'm just too stupid to use this thing even though I like to think of myself as very knowledgable about these things. All of which leads to posting on Monkeyfilter!
• Huh - I used Endnote for my thesis and loved it. You wrote that in English, didn't you? Also, if you are in Adelaide, we possibly need to get a meetup together. Between MeFites and MoFites, I think there are maybe 5+ here.
• Endmotes, footnotes, Pff! Pff I say! Why, when I was a student, we used good old fashioned plagiarism.
• A+!
• Thanks. Now we can have sex!
• Just as soon as you're finished writing my masters thesis for me.
• No cuts!
• Gentlemen, please! Less arguing, more photocopying.
• Wolof, can you mail me 60% of your PhD thesis? quidnunc needs to plagiarise some hot hot action, baby. Merci soixante mille fois.
• For those who don't use Endnote, the idea is that over time you use it to build up a big database of hundreds or thousands of bibliographic references that you can insert quickly into texts as foot/end notes as you type. Also, you can import citations from different catalogs and databases, so that you can avoid typing in the info for each entry separately. It also can insert citations for different types of sources automatically, allowing you to cite some old reference serial in, for example, MLA or Chicago formats without trying to remember exactly how to do this. So it sounds good in principle. But I've avoided using it, since I find Microsoft Word flaky as it is. It very occasionally freezes, crashes, etc., even without Endnote's cite-as-you-write functionality. Despite all my backups I still fear that some mysterious Microsoft file corruption will one day consume all my work. Another problem is that, as the top-poster noted, Endnote seems designed to manage citations, and not to function as well as an application for making or searching notes about sources. I've been playing with Microsoft's Onenote as a took for this and looking forward to Onenote 2007, which promises to be much better for taking and storing and searching notes on a big bunch of sources. I also saw a program for Macs called DevonThink that looked good for this. I'm (finally) getting near the end of my dissertation, and correcting and inserting notes is going to be an unbelievably horrendous task, but Endnote has just been a little too difficult and limited and scary for me to use, except experimentally. Here's hoping for better note-taking and footnoting apps. from Openoffice or Microsoft or etc. in the not-too-distant future.
• I know there is an openoffice effort, but it seems to be mainly just one guy who has a day job. Therefore, it is going ever so slow. I downloaded the Onenote 2007 beta and it confronted me with a million options, and I didn't feel like messing with them. There are a couple webbased attempts and certainly it is only a matter of time before someone gets it right with an ajax interface and whatnot.
• I will say that if you are using EndNote to, at the end of each day, go ahead and export your list of references so far into an .rtf file you can open in Word. I did this during my dissertation and it saved my bootie when EndNote erased my entire "dissertation" database when I upgraded. (wheee!) I keep using EndNote because it is a good program for keeping up with a big citation database. As washburn says, it's an easy way to swap between different formats. I'm in an interdisciplinary field (as is jccalhoun) and there are three or four citation styles I could be asked to use at any point (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.), depending on the journal in which I want to publish. I get easily confused about what goes where in each style, and left to my own devices usually end up using some mashed up version of all three. It's better to let the computer do it for me, so if I could find a program that is 1) easy to use 2) stable and 3) integrated into or compatible with Word or Open Office I would be a happy little bunny.
• You know, EndNote has a search function. You connect directly to a database and download the citation from within EndNote, properly formatted, and already including a link to the online PDF of the paper if available. (WebOfScience's EndNote refs kind of suck, but PubMed's are great.) I've done this about 567 times (according to my ref library). I also don't archive everything - I archive everything I might use in the future. Mostly I use EndNote to organize my print pubs and PDFs, by ref number, which makes it much easier to file the bastards and then find them again. I know that papers #201 through 250 are in folder X, for example. Also, for entering text into EndNote, um.. type in Word, Cut, Paste? Works for me when I do have to do it. Also - LaTeX? Those of you who mention it have never worked with anyone else on a pub, have you? I mean, honestly - it might be cool and all, but the average person I've worked with when writing things up is not (and never will be) a techie. There's a tradeoff between "power of the program" vs. "nobody but me knows how to make it go".
• (Or are all of you not in science? Seriously, every one of the 3 bazillion science journals uses a different preferred formatting style. For me it's easy - open that style format in EndNote and BAM, my paper is ready to submit.)
• Science here. No, not over there. Here. Yeah, you need to conform to the convention of the journal to which you are submitting, else they won't publish you. Shoot, I really hate reading when every sentence ends in a citation (Boggs, 1942). But that's the way they like it (Edgar et al, 2016). You just can't flow through it easily and get the juicy goodness (Myers and Briggs, 1995; Suitor and Prude, 1492; Fig. 7).
• LaTeX? Those of you who mention it have never worked with anyone else on a pub, have you? Twice. I've ended up being the go-to person integrating what other people wrote. It's not like it's difficult. You just drag and drop their text into the .tex file, and search on ( to find their cites. It wasn't a big deal. I do political science. Most all journals use the same citation format, so that's not normally an issue. If you were to use a nonstandard format, they'd probably let it slide for review and tell you to fix it if it were accepted. None of our journals give a flying fuck about formatting, with one exception. They (or their typesetters) don't expect camera-ready pages and just strip the text out of your paper and dump it into their own software. The exception is that journals will often say "12-point and double-space everything" to make their page limits more standardized.
• I saw that Washburn mentioned DevonThink. I work from primarily legal sources, and most of that is available electronically, so I can keep a searchable database of everything I use. As I mentioned before, I use Endnote for citations, although I think it's a little limited. There is a lot to be said for separating your article store and your note-taking from your reference manager.
• I was pretty excited when jccalhoun mentioned that there was a Onenote beta available. I decided to install it on my laptop, since I run XP on it. Onenote looks to be an interesting little program. But since installing it, Microsoft Word (from Office 2k) crashes whenever it opens a document. And of course all I ever do on my laptop (aside from wasting time on the internet) is edit Word files. My fault, I know. That's what I get for running a beta with an older version of Office. Okay. In any case it looks like I'll be spending a good chunk of tomorrow reinstalling Office, and maybe Windows, too (Which will mean installing 3.1, plus upgrades for 98, 2k, and XP). So, watch out for that beta.
• To the guy who was having trouble importing citations - Endnote used to tell you in the reference manager section exactly how it wanted you to format the citation text file ie it would give you the exact settings to use. Don't know if it still does. Oh and cite-while-you-write? May I just say ew? I turned that piece of excrement off because it was way too much trouble.
• I've been keeping a list of references (well, papers that I have read or acquired in the pre-writing stage) in an Access database. All the basic citation info with the abstract included so that I can search the records. I tried to convert it to Endnote and didn't get very far and after reading this I think I'll avoid Endnote. Hopefully, the Acces report dealie can format my records into a referencely useful form when the time comes.