Library Briefings

Citation manager

New EndNote software tracks and formats citation information

Managing the bibliographic minutiae of the scholarly process—book titles, author names, abstracts, page numbers, URLs, and even reading notes, graphs, and images—will now be easier for members of the Northwestern community. University Library, in collaboration with Galter Health Sciences Library, Pritzker Legal Resources Center, and the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, has acquired a sitewide license for EndNote, the popular bibliographic management program already familiar to hundreds of Northwestern students and faculty. Faculty, students, and staff on the Evanston and Chicago campuses can download EndNote and Northwestern’s EndNote Toolkit free of charge for home or office use. The software will also be available on hundreds of publicly accessible workstations across both NU campuses.

EndNote is software that resides on individual PCs and serves as a personal search tool, citation manager, and footnote, endnote, and bibliography formatter. It works closely with library databases such as WorldCat, Web of Science, MLA International Bibliography, and Historical Abstracts to gather and store citations in a personal library of information. It also allows a seamless and structured transfer of bibliographic information from hundreds of library catalogs worldwide, including NUcat, the Library of Congress, Harvard’s HOLLIS, and the University of California’s MELVYL.

When the user downloads citation information, EndNote recognizes and distinguishes all constituent parts, such as titles, personal names, and publication data, so that the structure of bibliographic information is not lost. This information can be inserted into footnotes in the proper format, used to create bibliographies on the fly, and even to provide a searchable database of abstracts, article excerpts, and reading notes, always tied directly to complete and accurate source citations. Northwestern’s EndNote Toolkit contains login and password scripts for restricted-access databases and the style sheets necessary to format bibliographies and footnotes. Both EndNote and the EndNote Toolkit can be downloaded at https://elms.e-academy.com/northwestern/.

“EndNote gives everyone in the Northwestern community a powerful tool to find, store, and output bibliographic information in many useful ways,” says David Bishop, University Librarian. “By making it easier to save and reuse bibliographic information, this software adds value to the Library’s resources and frees our user community to concentrate on what is really important: getting the most out of information sources of all kinds.”

University Library is now providing EndNote workshops open to students, faculty, and staff. Sessions will be held at both beginning and advanced levels to show how the software works and how it can be used with RefWorks, a web-based bibliography manager. The fall quarter workshop schedule is available at http://www.library.northwestern.edu/reference/workshops/index.html

For more information, please contact Jeffrey Garrett, Assistant University Librarian for Collection Management, at 7-5675 or jgarrett@northwestern.edu.

--Jeff Garrett