End Note 21 rather than fixing v20

EndNote EndNote General
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Hi All, I was VERY disappointed to read the post below for two reasons.
1st comments were disabled and the thread locked. (I do understand the post it referred to was an accident and should have been removed. However, the information is now in the public domain.

2nd. As noted across this forum, there is a LOT wrong with V20. To the extent that many who have paid for V20 have gone back to V19 and many others not upgraded or are looking for other options.
The option should be to fix the outstanding gripes about V20 and do free updates to V20, not try and charge people for the bad choices made by the developers. Unless V21 is FREE to V20 users, I won’t be upgrading and indeed looking for an alternative solution.
BTW I have been an EndNote user since V8 and have recently taken over archive planning for a set of 10 linked History groups. That is a lot of licences that won’t be going to EndNote in the current situation.


gillianEN
1d
Hello all! This is Gillian with the EndNote team. We are so grateful to have such a great, engaged community here. We read everything, even if we don’t always interact with it. Many of the things that we have added or addressed in patches to EndNote 20 we did because this community suggested it. So first and foremost, thank you for being here!
It seems as though this past weekend someone stumbled across a not-yet-ready-for-primetime web page regarding the upcoming EndNote 21, and posted it here. However, that page and the details on it are yet to be finalized, so regretfully we had to remove the post. We usually don’t remove things here — good or bad, we want the community to have a voice! — but in this case the details are still in flux and we don’t want to cause confusion if and when things should change. But here’s a couple things we can definitely share:
1. Yes, EndNote 21 is coming this spring! We are very excited to share it with you. More to come on more specific release timing and also the feature set. We’ll make sure this community are some of the first to know.
*2. Yes, there will be a preorder period with a discount! Look for more details on this in the next week or two.*Stay tuned… and happy citing!

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Hi Chris:

Thanks for reaching out. As I said we usually don’t remove or lock posts at all – we think it’s important people have a chance to say their piece, and it often helps us to make priority calls on the hot button topics for our users. But in this case we had a risk of what could potentially wind up being misinformation spreading… much of the information there was place-holder information while we built the page. We really couldn’t leave it as it is.

As for the feedback on 20 – I hear you. EndNote 20 was a big departure from the previous versions, and change is always painful when you’re used to something. Heck, my local supermarket rearranged the aisles and it took me twice as long to find what I needed; it’s so frustrating! The issue is that we were seeing a lot of newer users preferring Mendeley or Zotero – not because they weren’t willing to pay the money for the premium feature set of EndNote, but because those products’ interfaces were cleaner, simpler, and more modern. So we absolutely had to make a change. We worked really hard to balance the needs of the existing user community with the needs of those new users, who wanted a modern and easier to use interface. We always understood that that might mean some users who were used to the older version would struggle with the new one, but we did extensive user testing and found most users, once they got used to it, preferred the new version. That said, since EndNote is sold as a perpetual license, for anyone who still prefers the older interface, they are welcome to keep using their preferred version for as long as they have a system that is able to run it.

Aside from the change in interface, I’m not entirely sure what you are referring to by “fixing” EndNote 20. We have made a number of releases to 20 based on user feedback we received after we launched in fall of 2020 – we restored the ability to see the PDF viewer in the reference panel, we returned the “Cite” button to the reference record, we altered the spacing between the references, and more! – all based on the feedback received from users like yourself. And that’s in addition to bugs addressed with each release. Of course no software is ever bug-free, but we have always been dedicated to putting out regular updates to our shipped version to address as many as possible, and with 5 patches to EndNote 20 in the last 2+ years, I think we’ve lived up to that.

If you have a few moments, however, I’d be very interested to hear what you see as the top 3 issues with EndNote 20 that we have yet to address as of 20.5, to help us prioritize any additional work.

In the meantime, yes, we have also been working on 21. We think people will be interested in what EndNote 21 will have to offer. We are introducing some features that have been long requested by our users and ranked highest in user surveys. More information to come on that.

Thanks again for taking the time to reach out and I hope you have a great week.

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1: Please take a look here: EndNote 20.5 Re-starting on its own after closing - EndNote / EndNote General - Discourse and respond.

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Thanks, Martin. Yes, we are aware of that issue, which was raised to us after the last update. It’s certainly an annoying issue. We are working on a fix which will come out in a future update, though I don’t have timing on that just yet.

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Hi Gillian:

Did I read correctly? Did you remove a post? That is censorship! Hardly fitting for an academic software vendor. Although I PreOrdered EN 20, I only installed it after version 20.5’s release, and after much earlier refusals by Clarivate to refund the preorder that I until a couple of weeks ago had not yet installed. As far as I can see, there is not much difference between EN9X and EN20.

Now I can understand the business logic behind your commercial decisions to maximize your revenue. However, deleting and censoring posts as indicated above is unacceptable. You could have edited or removed the web page you mistakenly published. You could have commented on the post that the information was invalid.

Instead of hollow words of appreciation for its paying customers, Clarivate/EndNote should:

  1. Apologize.
  2. Restore the post.
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Hi @nmadani You misunderstood. Clarivate Marketing posted an announcement too early. That was the post that was removed. That is standard practice and not censorship to remove one of your own posts that was posted in error.

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Thanks for correcting me, and with apologies for having accused Clarivate of censorship. My interpretation was that a forum post by a user that referred to a web page (that was also removed) was removed.

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Many EN 20.5 users eagerly await the fix for spontaneous restarting after attempted closing.

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Hi Gillian

Sorry for the slow response. I have been very busy and EndNote is not a tool I use daily. Rather than me, as a light user, list my top three, you would be better looking at the forum to see the list of problems with 20.5 and the list of dislikes on the V20 UI from the more intensive users than I.

Obviously there is the restart after close down. Then there are the changes to the UI that disrupt the many users (the way the records are fixed and not as easy to use) but also the features and key combinations that were removed. In other software, they usually let you have multiple key mapping so that you can still use the old way. In one program I have, you have 4 different sets of mapping as standard.

One thing that is crucial for me. Having paid to get to V20 (having done multiple paid upgrades from V8) I would want the problems caused by V20 to be fixed in V20. I am not going to pay for V21 to fix problems Clarivate have caused.

I am at the moment being asked to sort out the IT and organization for multiple groups who will need something like Clarivate. I am surprised that having mentioned this in a post, I am now getting direct emails from a commercial account manager at Clarivate to ask about discounted Endnote Licences “for my team” Please tell Branislav K that it will depend on how Clarivate handles the comments and users in this forum. It is not the initial cost of the app, but the lifetime user experience and that includes support, this forum as well as licence costs. As mentioned above, people are going to the competition, not because some of the competition is free but the user experience with EndNote.

So do a “clean up” on V20.5 as a 20.6 update BEFORE going to V21 Or, I think, you will lose a lot of users old and new.

1 Like
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Hi, thanks for reaching out. Yes, we are aware of that issue, and are already working on fixing it in an upcoming update to EndNote 20. We would have fixed it previously but unfortunately it came to light after 20.5 was released.

Have a great day.

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Thanks for the update… It is not just finding the fix, but doing the testing too. Better it is in V20.6 and works than 20.5 and “mostly” works :slight_smile:

However, I hope you look at all the other points raised across the form for the V20 UI. Like many, I find the news interface a bit clunky and some of the options need to be put back.
One new thing is adjusting the screen colours, but there are a lot more experienced users than me rasing point across the forum.

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Thank you! Understood. It is a bit challenging to get specifics as to exactly what people are still missing. What I mostly hear is “bring back the X9 interface…” which is unfortunately just not feasible. That interface was functionally unchanged since the early 2000s, and in order to support modern needs of ease of use and accessibility, we had no choice but to change it. It was not done on a whim, though – before we released the product, we did extensive testing with both new and longterm users to try to strike the right balance of continuity vs change. I can’t say we got it 100% right, but we have tried to make course corrections with the 5 patches we’ve released to date. But thanks to the new interface, it now can work with screen readers, has fewer keyboard traps, and is easier for a newbie to pick up – all things we desperately needed.

We will continue monitoring this forum as always, so if there are specific things you want to see, please do give a shout out. You can even tag me. :slight_smile:

“One thing that is crucial for me. Having paid to get to V20 (having done multiple paid upgrades from V8) I would want the problems caused by V20 to be fixed in V20.”

I fully agree! As I mentioned, the issue closing EndNote 20 will be patched in EndNote 20. Just because we are releasing 21 does not mean we are completely stopping support for the previous version. But we also have ideas for new features etc that were deserving of a new version, if that makes sense.

I hope this helps!

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I have many moons ago complained to customer support about the fact that you now cannot re-open a record in a separate window to edit, even though you can to generate it in the first place. This was a valuable feature in V19 as you could then view both the record and the generated citation to make sure they were correct. The CS rep figuratively rolled his eyes and said, yes, this is a well known problem and he hoped it would be fixed in a patch “soon”. It never has and I can understand people reverting to V19 in frustration. I also have long open Case “#TS-02840780:Problem with removal of dots from URL” which remains unsolved.

Then today I am offered V21 to buy, even though I have no need of more features. So has Clarivate been taking features away just so they can be sold back to one later? Will these irritating bugs ever be fixed in V20?

2 Likes
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@gillianEN These are my feelings too… fix V20 as V20 before going to V21. Otherwise, you are likely to loose a lot of current customers.

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This I found useful as well. However, this needs to be fixed in V20. I won’t be upgrading to V21 unless things that are in V19 that are not in V20 are put back.

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Thanks Jillian,
By Trust, I already purchased the 21V.
However, may you please provide some details about the new version vs 20?

Thank you

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Also, what fixes there will be to V20. Unless as a show of good faith V20 is fixed, I won’t be going to V21. (unless it has killer features I REALLY need, and I don’t mean putting back things that were in v19)

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My top three requests for EndNote for Mac (and 3 bonus ones):

  1. Possibility to use its databases like Web of Science without requiring the University VPN. Just using a username and password, as possible from EndNote X2 to EndNote X7 (missing in EndNote X8 and newer ones to EndNote 20.5).

  2. When importing references from Web of Science Core Collection (Clarivate) into Endnote, the article number should be included in such field, and not in the DOI field, as happens with some references from some (many) journals, since afterwards the EndNote-formatted list of references in Word does not show correctly, and fixing that manually takes hours of tedious work.

  3. EndNote cites as "Smith et al., 2006; 2007” and "Smith et al., 2006; 2007; 2008” (which are wrong), instead of “Smith et al., 2006a,b” and “Smith et al., 2006a-c”, respectively, when such “et al” are different authors (or the same authors in other order).

                               And three bonus:

• Bonus one: It would be great if EndNote allowed to choose bibliographic output styles based on a particular reference format indicated by the user. For instance, the user types a citation as wanted, like this:

Smith A, Smith BC, Smith DEF (2020): This is the article title. Journal Name 10:234-254.

And then EndNote should show output styles similar to it, sorted from better (identical, if available) to worse (requiring some manual editing to fit the user requirement). Now it is virtually impossible to find a particular style fulfilling a particular format, since there are thousands to choose from (more than 6,000 as indicated at Output Styles.

• Bonus 2: It would be better if EndNote inserted the list of references where the cursor is, or even better, asking the user where to insert it.

• Bonus 3: It is not possible to search Clarivate Analytics databases from from WoS or EndNote using DOI or other useful keywords, since only a limited reduced set of options shows. Yet, a much richer set of options is shown for other databases like PubMed (NLM). It would be great if that was fixed.

That is all for now (other suggestions sent by e-mail over the years). EndNote for Mac is great, but could be even greater!

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Sounds great!
As i mentioned before. I purchased the V21 By trust EndNote.
Now that very much convinced. Not surprised that you will bring benefits!

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If you read the forum, something I failed to do before recently buying V20, you would see a lot of people who bought V20 have reverted to V19 and are asking for V20 to be fixed before they will spend any money on V21…