Product: Endnote 2.1.3 Macintosh

Author: Dr. John Pilling

Discipline: Metallurgical Engineering

Contact: drjohn@mtu.edu, Michigan Technological University, Houghton MI 49931

Keeping up with the ever increasing amount of literature published in ones field can be a daunting task; making that literature available on the web to ones collegues and students could be even more so... were it not for EndNote. My area of research is Superplasticity, and in conjunction with the Library at the University I have an electronic search of the major abstracting services conducted once every six months. My keyword search is now extremely refined so that only those articles published on my subject in the preceeding 6 months are returned thereby minimising the on-line search costs. The result is a plain text file of citations complete with abstracts. Using the sample EndLink import filter, I created a filter specific to the Chem Abstracts / NTIS / Metadex format and use this to import the references directly into my endnote bibliography. Since the newly imported references are clearly marked it is a simple matter of quickly scrolling through the bibliography (now some 2500+ entries dating back to 1934) to eliminate the duplicates that differ because of minor variations in author, title or abstract. To publish the information on the web I created an HTML export style, inserting the HTML tags to correctly format the citations. The bibliography can now be searched using the "Find" command and any number of criteria, such as by a particular class of materials, by year of publication or by conference title, used to obtain specific lists of citations. The resulting export file then has a title and commentary added to the top and is linked into my bibliography home page allowing anyone on the web to access the "superplasticity" literature.

http://www.mm.mtu.edu/~drjohn/superplasticity.html

EndNote is also indispensible when it comes to peer reviewing articles. By simply entering the Authors name or names into the "Find" command with the bibliography open, all the papers previously published by those authors are listed. Sorting the resulting search by Date and reviewing first the titles and then the abstracts, quickly determines whether the authors have published the same or a similar article before in a conference or other journal. EndNote can quickly alert one to the possibility of double or even triple publishing the same paper. Moreover, the citations in the paper can be validated quickly and corrected if necessary.
One shortcoming of EndNote which Niles & Associates might like to address in the near future is developing a cgi interface for EndNote so that people accessing the literature homepage could enter a series of keywords and boolean operators and have the results of their particular search of the endnote bibliography returned automatically.