Writing scientific papers and grants is usually a collaborative effort. Endnote is great if one person is writing and using one library. However, usually multiple people are contributing and sharing a library is very difficult. Within a lab everybody could use the same version of Endnote, but when collaborations extend to other labs or universities or countries problems arise. Because everybody is writing at once, sharing a library doesn’t work. If different people are importing references at the same time it is not clear how a master library could be kept. The solution it seems would be to have everybody’s sections contain references from their own library(s). Endnote would then need to be able to write a bibliography using references from different libraries. Of course, this currently works, unless there a two or more citations of the same reference from different libraries. The “merge duplicates in bibliography” does not work well (at all?). Perhaps this is due to subtle differences in the fields between two databases. Here are some ideas on how the problems could be addressed:
1. Have each reference be an absolute link to the actual Pubmed database. That way everybody would always have the correct reference even if Pubmed changed fields. Then merge duplicates might actually work. References not in Pubmed would have to be dealt with separately, but in general in my writing I don’t cite anything that isn’t in Pubmed.
2. Have the generate bibliography be more interactive. Make it easy to identify duplicate references and eliminate them. Perhaps endnote could make an alias in one citation to the other (the one with the most uses is the master and the others have aliases).
3. Having the update reference feature that is currently available in X5 be done in batch for all references would be useful. I wonder if making a traveling library from a collaborative manuscript and then updating all the references would then allow the merge duplicates to work?
I am writing a grant with 8 Principle Investigators and need a solution to this problem. Please help!