Can EndNote find pdfs on your harddrive and import them?
If you have papers scattered around your harddrive, what’s the most efficient way to get them into an EndNote file?
Well, you could do a search for *.PDF and move them all into one folder. Depending on where they come from, and what data is embedded in the PDF, Endnote X4 or X5 may be able to to import the PDFs in a folder - but in my experience it is less than satisfying as different providers have different metadata and some fail to upload with critical info. I haven’t tried again with the update reference facility of X5 though.
If you have X4 or later, you can use the Import PDF feature and select a parent folder where EndNote will recursively import PDFs in subfolders. You will likely get imported PDFs you didn’t want to import but you can always delete those.
As Leanne mentions, with X5 you can edit any imported PDF record where the bibliographic record isn’t found (i.e., filename is used as the title) and use the Find Reference Update to fill in the missing fields.
- Mathilda, the EndNote team