Product: EndNote 3.1.0 for Windows

Author: Paul N. Levett, PhD ABMM University of the West Indies, School of Clinical Medicine & Research, Barbados

Discipline: Clinical Microbiology

Contact:levett@sunbeach.net Leptospira Laboratory, Enmore #2, Lower Collymore Rock, St.Michael, Barbados

When I took over as the head of a laboratory doing diagnosis and research on leptospirosis about 8 years ago, one of the first things we did was to re-arrange the collection of reprints. These were initially all filed in envelopes, within boxes, and were organized alphabetically. The card-index was arranged by subject. It took myself and one of my lab techs several days, but we ended up with a four-draw filing cabinet full of folders arranged by subject, so that any topic could be reviewed by pulling a single folder out of the file.

Unfortunately, we were still left with the card-index, which filled several boxes of 6”x4” cards. We estimated several hundred cards, written in differing formats as they had been completed by a number of people in over 12 years of operation of the lab. Some of the citations were incomplete and some of them referred to reprints lost or damaged by termites! And now of course totally unrelated to the reprints. We continued for a while, adding new cards for new entries to the collection, but the sorting of index cards never really matched up with the reprints.

At this stage I was using EndNote 2 Plus, and finding it useful but still limiting in some ways. It was useful as a reference manager for writing reports, but the interface with Word Perfect was, well, unexciting. Gradually things changed, PubMed became freely available on the web, allowing unlimited MedLine searching, journals were becoming available on the internet with downloads of reprint-quality files in Acrobat (.pdf) format. And then, last year, I bought my upgrade copy of EndNote 3. The scales fell from my eyes!

Not only is EndNote 3 easier to use than its predecessors, but it is much more powerful. Our database is now 1200 references, and on a Pentium computer it runs as fast as you could wish. I like the ability to use as many keywords as I want for each reference, to search the entire collection by keyword, then show the entire list again with a mouse click. Finding a reference in the list is easy: enter the first two or three letters of the first author’s name, and you’re there. One suggestion to make a good thing even better is to utilize the right mouse button for commands like cut and paste, and the wheel for scrolling.

The add-ins to Word and Word-Perfect are seamless, and the formatting of bibliographies is a wonderful feat. This makes it so easy to add additional references to a document already in draft form, or to change the formatting for submission to a different journal. Using EndNote 3 we have published in Journal of Clinical Microbiology, Clinical and Diagnostic Microbiology, Journal of Medical Microbiology and several book chapters.

Searching PubMed using the Connect feature allows us to download only citations and abstracts of papers we really want to read, before we obtain a reprint. And sometimes after reading the abstract, you decide you don’t really want the whole paper in your filing cabinet, so the abstract can stay in EndNote quite safely.

What really excites me about End Note 3, is the interaction possible between the reference manager aspect and the actual storage of reprints. Subscriptions to e-journals usually result in downloading large Acrobat (.pdf) files, which present the same problems paper reprints do: how to catalog them. You can reference your EndNote record with the filename, but that still seems like hard work. Another solution, which I have been using for about six months, is to use the URL field in each record (Ctrl-G) to launch the Acrobat viewer to actually see the reprint on your monitor. The final step in this process was to buy Adobe Acrobat and a scanner (total cost about $250), and then start the process of converting all our reprints into Acrobat files, which can be linked to EndNote 3.

Once you have done this, it becomes so easy to store all your e-reprints in a directory where EndNote 3 can find them. In my case I use a Zip disk, and then my students can borrow the reprint collection and print out what they really need, without ever removing the folder with the original paper copies from my office.

In a developing country, access to paper copies of many journals is almost impossible. The internet, search tools like PubMed, and software as powerful as EndNote3 have revolutionized our management of references and our reprint collection, at a really low cost.