I would love EndNote to have the ability to citations in the library be internally linked to other citations. In some journal issues, main articles may have associated with them multiple article length commentaries which are actually articles unto themselves. Sometimes it is not obvious that an article has subsequent commentaries because these commentaries can appear in later issues. By having the ability to have one citation record link to others, this would enable us an easier time to keep things like commentary articles and book reviews associated with the relevant main text.
This sounds like an interesting idea. How would you imagine this would work / display in the EndNote interface? Would there be some type of option to check when creating a record, like “Link to other records…” - with a dialog that allowed for the selection of the others? Would some type of chain/link icon then display in the Library window? Would it be desirable to provide an option in CWYW to “Cite linked records…” ?
Jason Rollins, the EndNote team
This sounds like an interesting idea. How would you imagine this would work / display in the EndNote interface? Would there be some type of option to check when creating a record, like “Link to other records…” - with a dialog that allowed for the selection of the others? Would some type of chain/link icon then display in the Library window? Would it be desirable to provide an option in CWYW to “Cite linked records…” ?
Let’s see…
Within the record, there would a field to link to other records. If the field is already propagated with linked records, it would be displayed in the citation format that the user chooses as their default. For instance, I like to display mine in any of the anthropology styles.
I’m not sure there is a need to provide an option in CWYW to “Cite linked records” because you see, I’m envisioning that each record can contain multiple linked records. For example, some journal articles that have proved to be popular might receive two or more commentary articles from other journals or from the same journals. Popular scholarly books also receive multiple book reviews. If the record is one of those popular books, I would imagine that I would have several book review articles linked to that record.
For the scholar, this kind of internal linking is very helpful because it gives us a way to track who has said what about a certain article or book.
An additional thought:
I’d like to be able to create internal inks in fields where I type notes. For example, in the ‘Research Notes’ section for an article by Bulter, I might be writing something like this:
Although Butler argues for the difference between x and b, Madden disagrees.
It would be good for me to be able to link my Madden record to the phrase “Madden disagrees”. For scholars, being able to map the relationship between articles (who disagrees/agrees with what) and to see the genealogy of an argument unfold is really helpful.
Of course, in this case, EndNote is moving beyond the confines of simple a citation manager to becoming an ideas manager. But this trend has already been happening since the “Notes” or “Research Notes” field, and the Groups and Group Sets labels have been implemented.