Product: EndNote 3.0.1, Windows NT

Author: George M. Nickles III, M. S.

Company: Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia

Discipline: Industrial Engineering

When I started my graduate work here at Georgia Tech, I decided to begin research in a completely different area than what I had done for my Master’s thesis. I was far more interested in this new topic of Educational Technology. However, I had very little knowledge of the field and so had to start from scratch.

I began by checking out several books from the library and reading to gain a background in the field. All these Educational Technology books on my desk caught the eye of one of my fellow graduate students who will be graduating soon. She asked if I was planning on doing research in the area, and I said I was. She offered to let me look through her collection of articles in the field (over 200) which I was grateful for, but rather overwhelmed. She then mentioned EndNote and quickly introduced me to the program. All of these articles had been indexed in EndNote. So, I now have access to over 200 articles, which I can search using EndNote rather than digging through article after article. I have also started adding my own articles! In addition, many of the journals dealing with educational technology topics have articles on the WWW. For several articles I have found recently, I can put the URL in the reference so that I can jump to that article if I wish.

In fact, while I was earning my Masters’ degree, I saw a need for a product such as this. I did not know about EndNote, so I started developing my own program using Microsoft’s Visual Basic and Access. Mostly, I just wanted a program that I could use to catalog my articles and search through for references. However, I thought of many other functions I would like, including generating a list of references already in the proper form for whatever journal or publication I would be using, importing that list into a word processing program, and being able to save more than just journal articles and book sections. After a few months of work in the evenings, my program only had a fraction of the functionality of EndNote. The day my colleague introduced me to EndNote was the day I quit trying to make my own!

Also, being in the area of Industrial Engineering but doing educational research means publishing in conferences and journals with very different reference styles. The major domains for me are Industrial Engineering, Psychology, and Education. Again, EndNote to the rescue! I am still learning, but being able to create my own reference styles and importing references to Microsoft Word has been very easy.

I have been trying to tell all of my grad student friends about EndNote and encouraging them to use it. One of the great advantages I see in EndNote is having a “central” reference list for, a whole research group. Everyone in the research group could contribute their collection of references to this large list as a resource for everyone who comes after. Work on literature reviews is often “re-inventing the wheel” for those new to the field. The functions in EndNote of combining files and finding duplicates make it a great candidate for this task.