Endnote 20.3 Mac Pros and Cons

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I love Endnote but while 20.3 has an attractive looking interface, it is my least favourite version of the app, largely because it is so much less intuitive than previous versions and because some long standing features have been cut. Things that I would love to see fixed include:

  1. The individual reference view on the right side of the screen is set needlessly wide and does not remember my preferred split when I exit Endnote. So it has to be dragged back to a narrower width every time I open the app. If this alone was fixed it would make my interaction with Endnote less frustrating!

  2. It used to be possible to have a three window display with the formatted reference shown at the bottom of the right hand pane. Instead it now appears in the summary pane, which involves a needless mouse click to go there.

  3. When I select a reference, it immediately drops to the bottom of the reference list screen. This is super unhelpful when you are trying to find a specific paper in a list of thousands and are browsing through them! The old behaviour, where the references stayed put while you worked down a list was much, much easier. The new behaviour drives me nuts - an option to stop it happening would be very nice :slight_smile:

  4. Searching for authors is broken for multiple author papers - some are found and some are not. This is not good…

  5. Using the ‘copy formatted reference’ option includes the abstract where one is present, making the loss of item 2 even more of a problem.

  6. It appears no longer to be possible to decide which fields appear in the ‘edit’ version of the right hand reference pane. I don’t use about a third of them and so end up scrolling when adding references - something I never needed to do in the past.

Apart from that I like the cleaned up interface.

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It’s really buggy too. For example, the date range function doesn’t work (yearX:yearY); it only returns papers for yearY. I had to resort to my old Endnote 8.0 for this! Even then, although Endnote 20 could open the newly created (with Endnote 8.0) database, it only listed the most recent references I’d found while searching in Endnote 20. I managed to get round this by closing the database, re-opening it in Endnote 8, exporting it as an XML file, re-opening it in Endnote 20 and then importing the XML file. If you’re wondering why I’m still using Endnote 8, it’s because of similar issue to the ones you describe and the fact that I can’t run Endnote 8 on my newer, 64bit only macOS.

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I don’t have the date range problem - just checked, so glad you got that fixed. I am sure the right hand pane edit/summary view width memory failure is an oversight, because the formatted reference pane at the bottom of the summary pane does remember its height once it is dragged. What is bizarre is that there has been no attempt to fix the sizing issue and yet there are lots of complaints here about it.