EndNote is a bibliographic citation manager; or reference management software.
What does that mean?
A bibliographic citation is any reference to a book, journal article, video, or other source that you might use in an academic paper or article. EndNote allows you to manage those citations by saving, organizing, and formatting them into a bibliography or reference list in your thesis, publication or assignment.
What can it do?
- Imports sets of references found in database searches
- Finds and imports associated PDFs when available and allows you to make unlimited notes
- Provides a place to keep unlimited number of article references associated pdfs, charts, illustrations etc along with its abstract and research notes
- Inserts references into your thesis or publication and automatically formats them in the style you have chosen
What won't it do?
- It won't teach you how to reference correctly; you need to know how to do that before using any citation manager
- It won't make a correct reference if you enter incorrect data, or enter it in the wrong place
Should I use it?
- If you are doing research and handling lots of references, you should be using Endnote!
- Endnote is a computer program and it does take time to learn and gain proficiency so you should do some training before using it.
- It is most likely to be useful to researchers writing a thesis or preparing publication with substantial numbers of references.
- Undergraduate students who want to use a citation manager should consider using EndnoteOnline as it is web based and you can teach yourself to use it. However they may use Endnote on campus PCs if they wish.
