Product : EndNote Plus 2 and EndNote 3, Windows 95

Author : Philip Kim

Yale College of Yale University

My uncle gave me a copy of EndNote Plus 2 for my 18th birthday. He told me that it would be very useful to me as a college student who had struggled with papers in my first semester at a big university. Although it wasn't the most exciting birthday I can remember, in retrospect EndNote was the best present I have ever received, so much so that I treated myself to the version 3 upgrade as soon as it was released!

I've never seen a piece of software that is so helpful in every phase of writing an academic paper, from the initial conception and research to the final formatting. With EndNote I'm able to access online databases that I wouldn't even have known existed otherwise. What's easier: hunting through hundreds of individual databases, each with their own arcane text interfaces, or doing it all through one program? I feel that EndNote has not only made my academic writing easier and less time-consuming, it has improved the quality of my thought by guiding me unerringly to the most useful information.

One of the difficulties of a freshman college student is learning to cite references properly for the first time. To make matters worse, different professors expect you to use different standards. With EndNote, I don't have to interrupt my writing by painstakingly entering my citations in the proper format; I just run the document through EndNote at the end and everything comes out perfectly and instantly, in whatever format your professors like. Before EndNote I would deliberately limit my research to spare myself from keeping track of forty or fifty references; with EndNote I can use as many sources as I like with no additional work. Never mind the hours of typing it saves!

After watching my friends spend hours in the library and on the internet doing research that took me a few minutes, I showed them my little secret. They couldn't believe that such seemingly magical software existed, and were actually angry at me for not telling them sooner! Nowadays I recommend EndNote every chance I get.

Spreading the good word about EndNote yielded big advantages for me eventually. One of the nice perks of campus life is 24-hour access to the campus computing network. I had already been using EndNote to keep track of my rapidly expanding book shelves, but once my friends had all gotten their own copies, we started a shared database that we can all update as we get new books. Now if I need some source, I can run a search in EndNote. Chances are, one of my friends will have a copy, saving me a trip to the library or the bookstore. We even save money not buying duplicate copies of books we already have.

In my experience Endnote is the most powerful, versatile, and easy research tool there is, period. I'd rather give up my word processor, keyboard, and library card than my EndNote.