🚀 go-pugleaf

> > 1. "True" compaction of an EndNote file changes the record numbers, renderin
g
> >    the library useless in updating papers referenced with the old library,
>
> Now we're on the subject of record numbers, can I again (I certainly can!)
> bitch about them?  IMHO it is an absurd way of maintaining a database --
> there really is no flexibility *at all*.  For instance, what I would like
> to do is to share one big happy Endnote database between multiple users
> ...
>                Adrian

Adrian is absolutly right, as are those who have preceeded him in asking
Niles to fix this.  I've never expressed my opinion on this before, because
I judge myself to be a somewhat unusual EndNote user in that I absolutely
refuse to use record numbers in my citations (except for a few instances in
which EndNote, unnecessarily, won't work without them).  Instead, my
citations include first author, year, and the first several words of the
title, e.g.  [Schwartz, 1982, Greehouse hypothesis]. This works fine, as
long as enough of the title is included to distinguish it from any other
entries for Schwartz in 1982.  The price I pay for this is that I have to
type my citations in by hand.  However, I find this enormously preferable to
using record numbers to identify references.  In particular, this solves
what I consider the two big problems with record-number citations: (1) every
EndNote database is completely isolated (you can't easily share databases,
maintain separate sub-databases and merge them whenever you want to, format
a paper using another database containing the same references, etc.), and
(2) the in-text citation is not informative enough; it doesn't tell you at a
glance enough about what it refers to (e.g. if you have multiple references
with the same first author and year).

This could be fixed if EndNote were to use some sort of hashing-like
function to generate citation indexes.  If this were done, citations could
include some informative piece of the reference plus an encoding of the
reference that is at least highly likely to be unique in any database.  You
would have to resolve conflicts in the extremely rare cases where the
citation-generation algorithm produced the same citation key for more than
one reference.  A citation for "Smith, Jones, & Miller (1993), Everything
you ever wanted to know about bibliographic databases but were afraid to
ask" could then look something like [Smith-et-al, 1993, Everything...
#0923430] or [SmithJoMi-1991, EYEWTKABDBWATA#2340] or any one of many other
possibilities.  As long as the key for a citation is generated from author,
year, and title, the same citation key will be generated for the same
reference in all databases.

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Randall Sparks           Internet: randall@advtech.uswest.com