Getting Endnotes set up in advance of grad school

[dd123]

A question for the upper-year grad students who may be around: do you use Endnotes? Is it worth the time to set up? Have you had problems running it at all? If you don't use it, do you use an alternative? Is it worth pre-loading references into it, or should one just do it as s/he goes along?

Thanks for your thoughts on this.

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[dd123]

.

 

[Boston2k]

I used Zotero in the past - I generally prefer open source software to overpriced monoliths, plus it could read citations straight off the search engine. It looks improved since I last used it extensively.

 

[Ollie123]

Friend has gotten me using Endnote regularly now. I like it, and definitely think its worth the time.

I'm not sure what you mean by "pre-loading" references. I download things as I lit search, etc. You don't want to re-enter them everytime, that would defeat the point of Endnote.

 

[dd123]

Thanks for your thoughts on this. Ollie, What I mean by 'preloading,' I think (never having looked at or used it), is downloading the references into it before I actually start using it to write a paper (ie I'd be speculating as to which references I'll be needing, since I won't be 100% sure of my exact research question).

 

[Ollie123]

Oh.
Well the idea is that pretty much anything you read you just download into it. You just build a giant database. I have tons of stuff in there I've never cited and probably never will. There's really no reason to delete stuff once its in there, unless your files start getting prohibitively large.

Maybe download all your advisor's stuff and the big names in your area.

 

[dd123]

That makes sense. Thanks for your thoughts on this.

 

[6SAnthony]

I use Mendeley. Its free, backs up your references online and can auto extract citation information from PDFs. The only small problem with it is the limited types of sources that it can work with (hopefully, that will change). This downloads right to your computer, so there is no messing around with the internet.

I have loved this program. CHeck it out. (It's FREE and works with Microsoft Word)

 

[FadedC]

After reading this thread I decided to try out the free trial for endnotes and mendeley. Endnotes was harder to evaluate because it was rather not user friendly, and I feel it may not have been quite suited to my needs as a student. It may be that with some practice I'd be more impressed, but not being able to read articles from pdf or websites seems like a big minus. I also couldn't use it to access any of my usual databases because I need to go through the university to get into them, which didn't seem to be an option.

Mendeley I was more impressed with, however it did seem to have a few bugs. While adding new things to my bibliography it would also randomly delete characters from my old entries. I didn't really feel I could trust it to do my references without errors, which would seem to limit it's use quite a bit. Might be worth playing around with more though to see if I can somehow resolve that.

I'd be curious about other people's experiences, because something like this would seem to have the potential to be really useful in the long run.