- Upload from desktop to web is slow. Since updating in-text citations depends on the web, this making checking newly entered citations or fixing broken citations painful.
- The web version discards trailing spaces, while the desktop version does not. This making hacking an entry to make it pretty work in preview but not in the final document.
- Deleting a reference on the desktop doesn't delete the corresponding reference on the web. The reverse is probably also true, but untested.
- A Word doc builds a traveling library, which a simple "update citations" does not update. Instead, the best approach is to unformat all citations, quit Word, restart, then reformat. However, this can lead to a number of ambiguous citations. In particular, EndNote will perform a case-insensitive match against any string in any entry; it also gets lost if there are duplicate entries.
My final conclusion is that the EndNote Web process is a poor one.
We also chose to collaborate using Google Docs, which worked very well. EndNote usage was another matter. In particular, the temporary citation process: ctrl+c an entry in EndNote desktop and ctrl-v to another application (Google Docs) produces a citation in the form {Author's last name, year #num}. However, EndNote doesn't trust its #num as a unique identifier and will find anything with a matching last name / year entry. So, using this will cause problems, since the text (last name, year, obscure number) doesn't help humans identify the paper either. In fact, EndNote will match any {Author's last name, field} formatted item.
Therefore, a much better approach is to pick a more unique field, such as the title: {Author's last name, title}. If this isn't unique, then a {last name, label} where the label is a unique string. Of course, to check uniqueness requires a update citations, which is slow for EndNote Web. The full process is then: look at an entry to cite, manually create a {Author's last name, title} entry, download the paper, update citations, make sure all citations auto-resolve, then fix any problems.
So, what's a better process? Some ideas:
- Continue to use EndNote Web:
- Improve speed: upload only citations, not attachments, to EndNote Web. Create a new library for each new paper and only upload from that smaller library.
- Periodically delete all refs in EndNote Web then reupload to remove any deletions made on the desktop.
- Deal with any eaten trailing spaces by sighing in frustration.
- Move to EndNote on the PC.
- You can't share a file with a collaborator over the network / Dropbox / whatever.
- The alternative: get a copy or compressed copy of your collaborator's library and use that.
- Try another program. Both Zotero and WizFolio seem to be better at these things.
- Zotero supports temporary citations much like EndNote.
- WizFolio supports an older version of Google Docs, but not a temporary citation workaround I can see.
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