I started using EndNote with v3 until I eventually discovered Papers then Mendeley. Papers and Mendeley both have fantastic reference metadata recognition from more than the DOI from a PDF. They allow drag and drop of PDFs into their main windows and they find metadata, even for pre-DOI papers, pretty much immediately. So nice to use, but alas they both stopped working due to changes in my institution’s new firewall so I have gone back to EndNote, vX8.
X8 has improved a lot from previous versions, but why can’t it do among the most important of functions for a reference database and PDF reader (???); finding reference metadata easily by doing more than just looking at a DOI!
Please, please, please have a look at Papers and Mendeley and make drag and drop reference metadata acquisition happen for the next version of EndNote! It would make EndNote the bees knees!
You have been able to drag and drop to import PDFs into EndNote for several versions, you just have to be careful where you drop them. It has to be in the toolbar and menu area of the screen. If you drop then in the list of references, whichever reference you are on will get the PDFs attached to it (that is a drag and drop for method for manually attaching PDFs to refernces).
The tool does only use DOI lookup to find the correct metadata, as this is unique. Other applications use metadata and as a result they will find more but they do occasionally get the wrong metadata. It is a trade off.
The inability to find metadata for a PDF using something other than the DOI is a HUGE shortcoming. ReadCube/Papers does a great job of facilitating searches/metadata imports using title & author info. It requires a manual check for correctness, but this is still far faster than the current EndNote workflow. Please add this option soon!