EndNote
EndNote is the industry-standard for citation management software. It allows you to quickly and efficiently search for and store citations found through a variety of databases. You can also more easily cite work when writing manuscripts or working on projects without having to worry about manually rearranging citations or typing them in by hand. EndNote can also function to store articles that you have found, forever pairing the citation with the article in the same space on your computer.
The UTSW library offers EndNote free to residents here. Simply follow the directions to download and install. Regardless of your ultimate career plans, you should download this software while it is available as it is quite expensive on the regular market. You will also need to download the EndNote Cite While You Write (CWYW) plugin in order to gain full functionality in Microsoft word.
Using EndNote is very straightforward, however here are some simple instructions to help you get started.
Searching for citations
- First, Right-click “My groups” and select new group. Name the group after your project. This will be the group that you save citations to.
- To search for an article, click on the “Globe” widget near the top of the program. This will enable Online search mode.
- Click on the database you wish to search by selecting the name from the drop-down section “Online Search” on the left-hand part of the screen. Most of the time, this will be PubMed
- Once connected to pubmed, search for your article. Sometimes it can be difficult to find your specific article, so you may need to search for it several times. If you know the articles PMID (usually available from PubMed), you will be almost guaranteed to find the citation.
- Once you have found your citation, right click on the title, select “Add reference to” then choose the group you created. This will save the citation for future use. If you do not do this step, you will still be allowed to cite the article directly in word, but it will not be saved for future use.
- Click on “Local library mode”, the widget to the left of the online search mode widget in step 2 to be taken back to your library.
- Select your group to confirm the article was added. You are now prepared to cite the article in Word.
Citing articles in Word
- First go to Tools, select Cite While You Write then Format Bibliography. Make sure to choose the output style in the accepted style of your desired journal. If you choose a specific style but decide later that it needs to be changed, no worries, this can be done through this same pathway or through the EndNote tab in Word at a later time.
- When you are at a place in your text where you wish to cite an article, simply place the blinking cursor at that location and navigate to endnote.
- In Endnote, click on the article you wish to cite in order to highlight it. While highlighted, click on “Insert Citation” – the widget that looks like a document with a downward-facing arrow and a quotation mark. This will insert the citation in your desired style and create a “references” Page at the end of the document with the full citation.
- If you decide to delete the citation, highlight the citation in your text and either delete using backspace (if it’s a single citation), or Right click on the citation group in the text, navigate to edit citations, click more. This will bring up a box describing all the citations that are cited. You can then navigate to the right side of that box and select “remove citations”.
- If you need to reorder citations, simply place the citations where you desire. EndNote will do the work to ensure the numbers and citations will consistently align.
The Endnote website has detailed instructions on more complex tasks.