Product: EndNote version 3.0.1 for Windows
Author: Jan Petka. Food Research Institute, Bratislava, Slovakia &
I.N.R.A., Dijon, France
Discipline: Flavor Research
I started
my Ph.D. study at the Food Research Institute, Bratislava right after
university. Well, I found out quite early how difficult it is to write
a scientific article. In the beginning my thesis director employed me
by completing articles very often. For writing all the methods, materials,
results etc., there were no problems. However, when we completed the
text, it was a torture to deal with the references. He hated it. I came
to understand this early and I grew to hate it, too. Where was the problem?
First,
you may have arranged all your references in a reprint library, but
you cannot circumvent manually searching for them and then the annoying
typing of references. Of course, you may use previously written references
(applying Copy/Paste commands), but it is a really boring job. What
is more, nearly every publisher demands a different bibliographic format.
So if you do not always publish in the same journal, you must often
reformat your previous references.
I had
been using this "old good" method until last year when I was
accepted for a stage at I.N.R.A. Dijon, France. Immediately after my
arrival the laboratory director demanded that I install EndNote on my
PC (OS Windows 95). Until that moment I had never heard about it. After
installation and a short overview I understood that this is the tool
we were missing in Slovakia. And it was a real surprise for me. Now
I am familiar with the program and I would like to describe how I use
EndNote and what I appreciate about it.
Apparently,
EndNote is not used for the first year at I.N.R.A. We have here two
large EndNote libraries concerning aroma research (more than 3000 entries)
and sensory analysis (more than 5000 entries).
Since
these databases are located on our Intranet, I decided to make my own
library. There I put all interesting articles from the big libraries
(of course, nearly all articles are interesting, but I selected only
the essential ones) along with new articles of interest, too.
How did
I do it?
1.
"Private" library
First
I created a new library (File/New...). Then I opened the common library.
There I selected all the articles of interest (by mouse-clicking on
the entries while holding Ctrl key). EndNote enables a "drag-and-drop" function, so I could copy all selected entries into the new library in one step.
2.
Adding new entries
If you
want to add a new reference into your active library, just press Ctrl+N.
A pop-up window appears, where you can start typing the segments of
the new reference (author, journal, etc.). However, I primarily use
authors and journals lists. When you are ready to write a title of journal,
for example, try first Ctrl+1. If you have the title in your list, select
it and press Enter. The title appears in the journal cell. Here are
my lists of authors and journals that you can import into EndNote and
associate with your library.
If you
want to avoid typing of references, try to connect to a remote library
via File/Connect... You can search the selected library and then copy
the sought reference to your library. Unhappily, many of the free accessible
libraries contain mainly books.
So do you
have a "big" library now? You can start with inserting of
references into your article. To imagine how does it look like, click
here. When all the references are in place, just choose Tools/Format
Bibliography (or pre-defined shortcut key) and the EndNote Add-in will
replace unformatted citations (in the picture highlighted with red color)
with citations formatted in the chosen style and create the table of
references at the end of article.
To finish
this ode to EndNote:
In the
last few years many programs appeared with a high capacity for solving
user's problems. The program EndNote 3 is very useful tool. There are
many more possibilities to work even more effectively than I described.
Nevertheless, I tried just to highlight the most utilized functions.
After
my return to Slovakia I will make a huge propaganda for it among my
colleagues.
Why don't
you make your lives easier?
PS: Since
nobody's perfect (but EndNote is very close), I would appreciate in
the upgraded versions using of right mouse button. |
