EndNote 21

Endnote is a powerful tool to assist you in organising your research, including your sources, generating in-text citations, and your complete reference list. As with any system or platform there is a learning curve and so, this page offers practical guidance on some of the more common issues an Endnote user may encounter. There is of course a lot of excellent RCSI Library training content on how to install and use Endnote effectively. 

EndNote Online and EndNote Desktop both do the same essential job of collecting references and allowing you to store them in a library, and both have the Cite While You Write (CWYW) plugin that allows you to work with Endnote and Word to easily cite your sources. Visit the Clarivate website to learn more in general and also see a comparison chart. 

The desktop version is installed on your device, it is more powerful than EndNote Online (but there is more to learn with it) and includes features such as: working offline, unlimited storage of pdfs, annotation of pdfs, Searching the web for the full text of articles, and access to additional referencing styles.

Most of the troubleshooting content will cater for the desktop users, but you can learn more about Endnote Online from Clarivate.

Getting Started With Endnote

Trademark Endnote

• Only have 1 Endnote library open at a time with  the corresponding Word document, so that Endnote and Word sync effectively and accurately. Multiple open libraries can cause citation errors and sync conflicts between EndNote and Word.
• You can set up multiple separate libraries for different projects.
• As well as selecting a reference style on Endnote (Tools and Output Styles…), you can also do this on Word to ensure consistency.

Groups 

• Creating Groups within a library can help you organise your research for that project    (think of it as a library subset). For instance, you could create separate groups aligned to different sections of your project work, or to group different source types, i.e., books, online sources, articles. You can drag and drop references into different groups, and a single reference can belong to multiple groups without creating duplicates.

• To learn more about Groups you can visit the Clarivate here.

PDF files

• You can use the Import or Attach PDF feature to manually upload a PDF from your desktop to the Endnote library. This assigns a PDF version of an article to an Endnote entry, so you can read the article from Endnote and use the Annotation Tools to make notes.

• Endnote can also Search the Web for PDF files for each item in your library and attach them automatically.
• It is not always 100% effective at retrieving these files, however, and you should also verify that the attached files match your references, as the automatic matching may not be accurate.  

Editing Citations

• Should you notice any errors for a citation that Endnote produces when transferring it to Word, you can note that error, return to Endnote and correct the reference entry from there. Select the resource and look for the Edit option.

• You can use the Edit and Manage Citation(s) from Word to manually edit an in-text citation.  Click on the citation and use the 'Edit & Manage Citations' button in the EndNote toolbar on Word. You can:

1. Add page numbers for quotes (in the 'Pages' field)
2. Exclude author names (using the 'Exclude Author' or 'Show Only in Bibliography' options)
3. Format as narrative citations – exclude the author’s name for narrative citation*
4. Make other modifications without affecting the original reference in your EndNote library

* There are two in-text citation formats: parenthetical and narrative.

Parenthetical: the author name and publication date appear in parentheses. E.g., (Hank, 2019).

Narrative: An author's surname can appear in running text, with the date appearing in parentheses immediately after the author's name for a narrative citation. E.g., As Hanks (2019) remarks that disinformation is a state of being.