An EndNote Crash Course

Introduction

While it is not 100% perfect, using EndNote or an alternate referencing tool will hopefully make your degree slightly less painful, if for no other reason than it keeps all your references in one place which can come in handy as assignments overlap, saving you time looking things up again.

This guide focuses on EndNote and is built off all I learnt in the last four years (including all the mistakes and assumptions I incorrectly made) as well as the work of many fantastic librarians efforts at Curtin University as well as a number of other Australian unis who publish EndNote guides, as well as the EndNote help files and user forum.

The guide is written using screenshots from Mac OS and EndNote X9, things should be in similar spots on Windows and in EndNote X8 if you have an older version.

Getting EndNote

This guide assumes that you have access to EndNote from your institution which most Australian universities seem to offer.

• Curtin University: Can be downloaded from the My Library tab in OASIS
• University of WA: Guide
• Murdoch University: Download
• ECU: Guide

Caveats

There's other general advice and tips littered throughout, but let's clear up some things straight off the bat that have caught me out multiple times:

• Use the right style: It sounds obvious, but make sure you use the style relevant for your assignment/submission, including any specific ones your institution offers (e.g. Curtin University has a custom APA style which I wasn't using for a year). If you need different styles to what is available (e.g. EndNote didn't ship with APA7 that was recently released but your course uses it), you can download them from the EndNote website. If you study Law you're in for a treat given the Australian Guide to Legal Citation is a bit of an edge case, thankfully there's great reference guides from most Law School libraries and you can get an EndNote style from the Universisty of Technology Sydney website.
• Garbage In, Garbage Out: Even with the correct citation/referencing style selected, EndNote can't pick up what data might be missing from your references and will just spit out whatever is there. Make sure you have filled in all relevant fields and sanity check what is in there.
• Abbreviated journal titles: When you download citation files (RIS etc.) from places such as PubMed you may find that the journal names have been abbreviated (which, for some citation styles such as Vancouver is actually desired), make sure you correct any of these as you go depending on what your referencing style expects. An example: An exported reference from PubMed had the journal title as Scand J Trauma Resusc Emerg Med which, in APA format at least, should be Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine.
• Corporate Authors: A great example is the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare which you'll no doubt use at some point if you do a health degree - your author field should have a comma at the end of it e.g.

  Australian Institute of Health and Welfare,

  so it is formatted correctly. Leaving that comma off gives you a result that looks like this:

  Welfare, A. I. o. H. a.

Basic Setup

With EndNote installed you can start some basic setup, there's a few elements to this which are covered here - if you need more detail there's some good YouTube videos

EndNote

• One library: All the recommendations are that you only have one EndNote library and that you sort/manage your references by using groups. Don't create a library for each unit or semester.
• Where you store the library matters: Your mileage might vary on this one, but the makers of EndNote explicitly say that the software isn't designed to cope with being used when libraries are stored on file sharing platforms like OneDrive, Dropbox or iCloud. In saying that, EndNote Online isn't overly user friendly (or wasn't when I last attempted to use it) but the EndNote Sync functionality it offers may help to move between machines.

Word

EndNote ships with an extension called Cite While You Write (CWYW) which gives you a new toolbar in Word to manage your referencing within a document

The toolbar gives you the ability to add citations to the document, select the referencing style, configure the bibliography output (covered below in Getting Rolling)

References

References are the things you're using in your submissions - it can be anything from a Journal Article to a Report or Book. References have fields, which are all the information about a particular reference including items such as the title, authors, publication year and DOI. Different reference types have different fields - for example, a book has a publisher and place published while a journal article has a journal, volume and issue.

Fields

We've already spoken about it in Caveats, but it is important to remember when you create a new reference its important to fill in all possible fields to ensure you get a complete reference - for an APA 7 reference of Journal Article type that would be the following:

• Author(s)
• Year
• Title
• Journal
• Volume
• Issue (If the journal uses an issue format)
• Page range
• DOI (preferred) or URL

Check your University's referencing guide or style manual to make sure you are familiar with the fields that are needed to generate a complete reference.

Research Notes

In EndNote you'll see two notes fields - Notes and Reference Notes, the latter being a newer addition - given some imported references may have information in the Notes field, its recommended that when you're making notes on the papers/references you've found that you put them in Research Notes. This is a handy spot to put any key points or ideas you've pulled from the paper or where you want to use it in your paper.

Duplicates

EndNote has a great option for finding duplicate references. To access it, from the main menu select "References -> Find Duplicates". That will scan your library and offer up each detected duplicate one by one allowing you to copy and paste information between them (if required) before moving one of the records to the trash, which you do by chosing the record you want and selecting "Keep This Record". Fields that are different are highlighted in blue so you can spot them more easily. You can also skip a record as you go through if you don't want to deal with it right now - after the "Find Duplicates" process is completed you get a new group called "Duplicate Records" in your My Library sidebar when you can review all the records you didn't action.

Understanding how EndNote detects duplicates helps - out of the box references are considered duplicates if they have the same reference type (e.g. Journal Article, Report) and the Author (first initial and last name), Year, and Title fields are identical.

Getting rolling

This section assumes you've got EndNote setup and working properly with Microsoft Word and you have some references within EndNote ready to use.

Adding a reference

There's multiple ways to add a reference to your document including from within Microsoft Word and from EndNote, a few of which we will go through.

In Microsoft Word, from the CWYW toolbar, you can select "Insert Citation" which will bring up a search window where you can find your reference and insert it (if you click the arrow on the insert button you can choose the format you want, for example, date only)

or, if you have the correct reference already selected in EndNote (maybe you just created it), you hae the choice of clicking the arrow on the "Insert Citation" button and choosing "Insert Selected Citation"

While not for everyone, you can use the temporary citations and have EndNote scan for them and insert the full references as required - an example would be {Australian Insitute of Health and Welfare, #319@9} which breaks down as follows - the curled braces ( { and } ) surround your citations and is what EndNote looks for when it scans the document, the authors name is included and then after the comma is your reference number as listed in EndNote, preceeded by a hash (in this case #319), and @9 refers to the page number - you can leave this last bit out if there's no page number you need to specifically reference.

Formatting your Bibliography/Reference List

As you add citations to your document, EndNote will automatically recreate a bibliography/reference table at the end of your document. For your assignment you will likely need to adapt your list to the style required for submission, to do so easily (hopefully to save you having to reformat it all at the end when you're ready to submit!) from the CWYW toolbar in Word, select "Configure Bibliography" and go to the Format tab where you will be able to set font style, line spacing, hanging indents and spacings to match your submission.

Alternatives

Some alternates exist if you absolutely hate EndNote or for some reason your institution doesn't offer it:

• Zotero: Open Source referencing software, available for Mac, Windows and Linux. Comes with a plug-in for Word similar to CWYW.
• Mendeley: Another alternative, shouldn't be installed at the same time as EndNote due to compatability issues with the Word plugins

This guide brought to you by Matt Didcoe, a Bachelor of Science (Paramedicine) student interested in extended care and mass gathering medicine. He once completed a Bachelor of Computer Science and still dabbles in technology.

Guide last updated: 28 April 2020