Product: EndNote 3.0.1, Windows NT
Author: Dudley Williams. M.S. D.Phil.
Biomedical
Mass Spectrometry
Sometimes
there are just not enough hours in the day. However hard you try, the
'To-do List' always acquires new entries at a rate greater than tasks
are accomplished.
We
are part of a busy laboratory complex: The Division of Immunology at
City of Hope, Pasadena. It's probably similar to most non-commercial
labs in that, although the rules of performance may not be the same
as in industry, there should be no mistake as to the imperative pressure
for the timely completion of tasks. We are all driven by our individual
devils.>
In
particular the ability to cite literature accurately and render it into
a variety of formats from granting agency to specialist journal is of
the utmost importance. Trading citations in a multidisciplinary division
allows rapid completion of deadline sensitive publications and grants.
In
our case the currency of life is represented by the consistent production
of high-quality research papers and their implication in the grant writing
process. Anyone who has tried to produce novel research according to
some arbitrarily game plan will notice that non-linearity governs the
entire process. One experiment that sounds easy on paper may take a
month and another that was the stroke of fortuitous illumination may
sprout wings in an afternoon. The result of this 'life's observation'
is that when the linear nature of deadlines is applied to situations
there will often arise a crunch-point at which it either gets done,
or not. These larger time-line issues may be tolerated reasonably well
once one has realized the properties of this strange universe. However,
we all take for granted some things that are implicit in a well-oiled
lab-machine. The ease of which data and text is manipulated on a computer.
Once the process often took longer than the experiment being described.
With typewriter and 'White-Out', fortunately a thing of the past, we
are accustomed to blasting through a few pages of script punching home
the relevant citations and printing the finishing touches before the
second mug of coffee has become reality. Things still go wrong. Less
trouble now perhaps with the hardware but software issue still bite
and leave painful wounds.
Our
time was up for the key paper and the NIH grant to leave and there were
those couple of pages left which our colleague had decided to create,
at the last moment, with some decisive strokes of penmanship. Our colleague's journal references however were in a format where endocrinology reigns supreme. His support was for our biochemical efforts in mass spectrometry. The cut and paste approach to these journal references will no longer suffice.
I
was grateful for my original exposure to EndNote as a graduate student
where it saved me many tedious hours of reference writing. With bare
wallet and sickened credit card I cheerfully shelled out over $100 for
the latest copy of 'EndNote'.
So
now the references were quickly reformatted, one into a standard format
suitable for the grant and the other, well that's a little more complex.
As a Mass Spectroscopist I had quickly discovered that there were no
standard formats available for the journals that we normally publish
in. This hardly slowed us down, I had learned how to construct our own
custom formats which conformed to the journal's requirements. We seemlessly
inserted the appropriate references in both sets of text switching between
one and the other at will. Another deadline met, who knows if our grant
application will be as successful?
What
a joy when you look back at a tough day and serious deadlines and realize
that prior to this tremendously innovative software what took a day
now takes half an hour. The pain of reference writing has been minimized
to that of data manipulation. Thank you EndNote, for liberation from
drudgery.
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