Endnote Alternatives
So two grad students came to ask me about Endnote today. The first had already bought it and was struggling to figure out some basic interface issues. The second had apparently heard my rant about the application secondhand, and so wanted to check with me before going out and buying it himself. “Should I buy Endnote?” he asked.
With great hesitation, I said “yeah, probably; there just aren’t any real alternatives I’m aware of.” I can’t tell the guy to mess with XML/XSLT/RDF after all. He just wants a nice GUI app to manage his references and format his citations and bibliographies.
However, I really don’t want to have to do that again. Long term, of course, it’s my hope that we’ll be able to provide a better, and free, alternative, but in the meantime, anyone know of any other acceptable options for Word/Windows users?
Both Word & the current version of OO.o allow you to pull citations from a database connection. For shared literature lists, this can be an OK solution. If the literature lists aren’t shared & all authoring is done on Word, Endnote is probably the best bet–the connectivity features makes adding citations simple & no other 3rd-party product matches the Word integration of Endnote. To borrow mutt’s tagline: “All bibliographic managers suck. This one just sucks less.”
This being said, Endnote is stagnant. If someone can’t get academic pricing on a new version of Endnote, they should save their money by purchasing a cheaper legacy copy off eBay.
Alternatives? Plenty. Substitutes? Not really.
If you’re wanting to do Windows + Word, you don’t really have a leg to stand on. Change any of the requirements, and there are more options.
Regarding the alternatives to EndNote - I’m working on an OpenOffice.org-based course-publishing system and we’re trying to find a workable alternative to EndNote, or even getting usable EndNote/OOo integration.
At this stage it looks like EndNote is the best option for managing references, but the RTF support in OpenOffice.org is not good enough to really use for formatting bibliographies we are trying to find a better solution.
I came across the citeproc XSLT stuff on the OOo site. Looks promising and my group at the University of Southern Queensland may be able to help out with OOo stylesheets, but I have a couple of questions for you. Would you mind contacting me?
Rich — yes, I know, but typically in my field these requirements are given. WinWord is overwhelmingly dominant. I hope to contribute to changing that over time, but that doesn’t help my grad students now.
Peter — the bib software landscape remains bleak indeed when a product like Endnote is the best option. I sent you a mail.
Looks like for once there are more and better alternatives on the Mac.
Nobody has mentioned either Reference Manager, or Biblioscape. I’d shy away from the first because it’s owned by the same company that owns Endnote, but I recall hearing good things about the second.
As for “better alternatives on the Mac,” I don’t agree. The only one I’m aware of is Bookends, which I’ve never liked. It may well at least be more stable though.
Reference Manager is also win32 only. The same company owns yet more bibliographic managers: ProCite and WriteNote. ProCite is OK. It hasn’t been ported to OS X & I don’t know if it ever will be, but it had more import styles than Endnote & better searching. They somewhat solve one of your notorious gripes about desktop bibliographic managers by allowing you to define your own reference types (still a flat database, but at least it is a CUSTOMIZABLE flat database). Still, out of all of their desktop products, I’d use Endnote–it seems to be the most deployed & has seen the most development (which, as I previously said, isn’t very much).
I haven’t tried WriteNote yet. It is their web-based product. I really do think online bibliographic stores are eventually going to be the way to go, but don’t know if I trust Thompson to bring us what we want. There is a free trial, so I should probably try it out.
I long for an alternative to endnote. It is such a pain. You would think that after all this time there would be an easy way to make entries for individual entries in a collection of essays or internet sources…
“As for “better alternatives on the Mac,†I don’t agree. The only one I’m aware of is Bookends, which I’ve never liked. It may well at least be more stable though.”
Bookends isn’t perfect but it does more or less what Endnote does and in contrast to Endnote you get really goodsupport. There’s also Sente which works with Word and has a lot of nice touches to it. Both apps have their pros and cons and may not replace Endnote in every scenario, but IMO most cases can be handled with either Bookends or Sente-
have a look at Connotea open source reference management http://www.connotea.org/ http://www.connotea.org/user/Declan
Services like Connotea and CiteULike should be able to evolve to cover the same territory. But right now all they do is store reference data. You can’t format your documents with them.
Note, though: I don’t think it’d be that hard to add that functionality, and have advocated it a number of times. My citeproc code can already interact with databases over HTTP.
BTW, there’s another problem with Connotea for more general reference management: its data model is designed to handle journal articles, and not much more.
Regarding “better alternatives on the Mac,” there is a discussion of bibliographic software for Mac OS X, touching upon EndNote, Bookends, Sente, LaTeX and BibTeX, jabref, and BibDesk, in the following MacInTouch Reader Reports compilation:
http://www.macintouch.com/biblio.html
Thanks Aron. Woth a look for Mac users.
I’ve been involved in those threads before. I still think the market sucks in general, at least for people on the social science and humanities end of the spectrum (me!), who often have to deal wih stuff like legal documents and archival manuscripts.
Bookends has a horrid GUI that is straight out of the 1980s, Sente — while promising — has a very limited data model, and BibTeX — while I respect a lot about the community that has grown around it — is as limited as one would expect of a system designed in the 1980s around TeX. The BibDesk group are working on some interesting things for v2 which could yield something useful.
In the grand schema of things, at this moment in time, these aren’t really options as far as I’m concerned. And I see no evidence that Mac productivity developers (including Apple) — with the possible exception of Omni — are thinking about the low-level details that will make the sort of improvements we need possible; or at least easier.
Now, OTOH, if we manage to improve the bib support in OpenOffice along the lines where we’re headed, then things start to get really interesting, because the improved support is not just there in the GUI app, but baked into the open file format.
Linux Journal just printed a how-to on making bibliographies in OO.o (current versions, naturally). Grabbing citations from a SQL database in Word is quite similar. I know most darcusblog readers already grok this (and want to improve it), but the article is useful for showing others the current state of affairs.
Pros: free, collaborative (and works w/ diffferent programs on different platforms), somewhat more flexible (more fields which aren’t specific to a single record type), more powerful database on the backend.
Cons: more work to setup database/add entries/format bibliography.