🚀 go-pugleaf

Although it does a good job integrating references into Word, EndNote has
some significant drawbacks that really need to be addressed for it to be a
powerful tool for scholars.  My problems with it are the following:

1.  With large databases, it is very slow in entering or modifying records.
 It is particularly bad when a little change is made in an existing record.
 for example the following actions with my database, which contains 11134
records, indexed with QuickFind --

Action		                                                  time to complete
import and index record with 2347 characters	                  25 sec
delete a character from an same record, close	                 58 sec
insert space, then delete it, close record                     58 sec

Since it takes at least a minute to close a record that I have modified in
any way, I have to be very careful when I am working with Endnote as a
biblio database.  Of course this is the way I use it most.  I do not spend
most of my endnote time formating papers.

Since Endnote will not do these operations in the background, my computer
is crippled for at least a minute when I close a modified record.  This
does not improve my efficiency.  I used to use FileMaker for the same
database (except it could store pictures and had about 9500 records).  It
also had all fields indexed, but its operations, like closing records, were
much faster than Endnote's.  It was much more efficient at day to day
maintenance of the database.  

Looking at the table above, it appears that Endnote is sort of stupid about
what has been changed in a record and what must be indexed.  It takes twice
as long to index an existing record as to import the same record, even if
the only change in the record was to insert a space and delete it.  Is it
unindexing everything in the record, then reindexing it?

2.  Suppose I have a paper in my hand and I want to bring up that reference
and only that reference in a large Endnote database.  How do I do it
quickly and efficiently.  A search on the author is not specific enough. 
Typing in the whole title is inefficient and will take a long time to
search.  Endnote needs to way to apply a single code to each article in the
database and this code needs to be searchable. 

You might say, make the reference number searchable.  This would work
within a database, but if databases are combined these numbers change. 
This prevents collaborative work on single papers between 2 authors with
separate databases. 

I use a system of creating unique codewords for each paper without
reference to the database.  These consisted of the last 2 digits of the
publication year, the first 3 letters of the first author's last name, the
first letter of the first author's first name and and the last 3 digits of
the first page number.  Thus an article by J.O. Smith published in 1983 and
starting on page 24 had the code, 83SmiJ024.  In about 9000 references I
had fewer than 3 pairs of duplicates, which were easily distinguished by
variations in the last character of the codewords.  

By allowing such an option rather than the existing numbering system,
Endnote would instantly become a collaborative system.  

3.  There are also some relatively minor formatting deficiencies.  A
previous article has already mentioned the restrictive and limited method
that Endnote uses for author names.  It is not difficult to write a parser
that can handle variations in input methods for author names and the
wonderfully complex mix of prefixes and suffixes that people love to use to
refer to themselves.  It would be nice to have a method for name entry that
requires less punctuation and capitalization.  Not essential, but nice.

Endnote does not allow title fields to be optionally capitalized (first
letter of each word) or not.  Capitalization of entries made with all words
but proper nouns uncapitalized is easy.  This should be the standard method
for title entry, with the option of capitalization.

The operation of Endnote as a module in Word is really great, but it has
been awhile since basic functionality has improved.  Here's hoping that
Endnote will continue to get better!

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
/ Stuart Strand, Univ.Washington              sstrand@u.washington.edu /
/ AR-10, Seattle WA 98195 206-543-5350   uunet:  beaver!milton!sstrand /
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////