Create Book Section record from a Book record.

Hi,

I know Endnote is not a relational database. This is not what I am suggesting. What I would like to see is an easier way to enter book sections into Endnote.

Since book sections are not usually a citation that can be downloaded form online resources (and therefore must always be entered manually) I suggest that EndNote have a feature in which a book reference (which usually is available to download from online catalogues) can be used as the basis of a book section.

For example, say you have a book reference in your EndNote library. Right click on it and select “create book section from this source” or similar. This would create a new reference with the book part already filled out in the appropriate spots from the book referenece. The only parts that would then need to be filled manually would be the chapter/section author and title.

Currently, the only shortest way I can see is to copy the whole book reference then use copy/paste to move all the info around before adding the new section related info. Quite time-consuming and prone to human error.

Ta.

2 Likes

Hmmm … can you not just copy the existing record, paste it – now you have a duplicate – and then change the reference type of the one to Book Section? The you just fill in the section info, which you have to do anyway.

Well, I tried this and it does screwy things in the Reference Panel. First, listing from the top in the new Book Section entry it gives us Author, Year, Title, Editor, Book Title. I assume the Author and Title refer to those of the chapter or section – but the Year must refer to the book itself, and is thus is grouped improperly, out of place. So also is the Editor. The sequence should logically be Author, Title, [of the chapter], then Book Title, Editor, Year [of the Book]. The latter three could conceivably be switched around, but they should be grouped together.

Secondly, what is stranger, when I convert the Book that has an Editor specified to a Book Section, it puts the Editor name as the Series Editor. If you already have a Series Editor in the Book reference, the two get switched. So the Book’s Editor = X and Series Editor = Y gets switched to become in the Book Section Editor = Y and Series Editor = X. Crazy.

There are other field ordering problems. No need to review them here, except to say we really need to be able to order those fields in a way that makes sense – and if EN people think they make sense now, then we need at least to be able to order them so they make sense to us.

Sorry to get off on a tangent, but it all stems from my attempt to explain the conversion. I didn’t think you would have to copy and paste a lot, but now I see you would have to, inexplicably! I will submit this to tech support to see if they can straighten me out …

1 Like

I know this is three years later, but this problem still persists. I want to echo that this is a problem which I hope can be resolved in future versions.

I really like EndNote, but am starting to wonder if Zotero’s community has grown enough to be more responsive to user concerns such as this and several others… I’ll be asking around with my colleagues.

Has anything been done on this very common issue yet? I’m on X7 and very little seems to have changed.

Awiklendt’s simple and intuitive suggestion was:

“Right click on it and select “create book section from this source” or similar. This would create a new reference with the book part already filled out in the appropriate spots from the book referenece. The only parts that would then need to be filled manually would be the chapter/section author and title.”

 

 

Sounds perfect to me

Has anything been done on this very common issue yet? I’m on X7 and very little seems to have changed.

Awiklendt’s simple and intuitive suggestion was:

“Right click on it and select “create book section from this source” or similar. This would create a new reference with the book part already filled out in the appropriate spots from the book referenece. The only parts that would then need to be filled manually would be the chapter/section author and title.”

Sounds perfect to me