Endnote for iPad: cannot search for keywords?!

At first: Joy! Endnote is finally available on my tablet, and still in time to help me finish my dissertation!

But soon: despair. How is it one cannot search for keywords? I chose the “Everything” option instead of Title or Author, but still nothing. I get only 11 out of a possible 93 records  in one search, beccause of a few matching titles, and absolutle no hits on another search because no titles matched the keyword, though there should have been 4 results. (I ran test searches on my desktop to compare).

I did notice that the keywords within a record are searchable by tapping the word, but that is useless if you can’t find the record to start with because they have cheeky titles and keywords are the only thing telling me to which chapter of the dissertation they belong.

My workflow lives and dies by the searchability of keywords in my references. I don’t use groups, and frankly won’t start. I’m too deep into the diss to spend time re-working my entire database structure. 

If the “Everything” option isn’t really searching every field in the records, then this absolutely must be an immediate fix. If, instead, I somehow managed to miss a setting somewhere, then by all means school me so I can fix it.

And to avoid the obvious: I am absolutely certain I have the “Everything” tab clicked instead of “Title” before I search. It seemed obvious, but it’s just not working.

Hmm. This might be a bug so the team is looking into it. I just did a quick test and was able to find items in Keywords so there may be a more subtle issue. If there is a real problem, we will cerainly prioritize it for an update as quickly as we can. A few other questions that might help us diagnose the issue:

  • Exact model of iPad?

  • How much memory?

  • Version of iOS - [BTW - I highly recommend NOT updating to iOS 6.1 as it is causing tons of issues for nearly all apps!]

  • How many records in your EndNote library?

  • What version/platform of EndNote desktop - if anyway

  • Have you Syncronized iPad and brought it records from the desktop or web?

  • Where/how were your keywords added? Typed in by hand on iPad? Typed in by hand on another version of EndNote? Imported along with bibliographic record data?

  • If you manually enter a keyword in a record on iPad, can you then search and find just that?

If you prefer to not post all of this on the forum, please email to me directly - jason [dot] rollins [at] thomsonreuters [dot] com.

Jason Rollins, the EndNote team

Thanks so much for the response, Jason.  To answer your questions:

Ipad 2

64 GB

iOS 5.1.1 

2,978 records

Endnote X3 for Mac

Is it possible to syncronise direct from my laptop?! I uploaded everything to MyEndnoteWeb, then synchronized the ipad to that.

All records were created on desktop version individually by hand. None were downloaded from any import method.

On your suggestion I created a new record manually on the iPad with a unique keyword.  A title search found it, and an “Everything” search for one of its title words found it.  However, an Everything search for the unique keyword found only a different record that happened to have the keyword as a fragment of its title, NOT the actual keyword I just created.

If this can help anyone else with this same problem, I’m happy to post here. 

Thanks for working on this!!

If you are going to use the EndNote for iPad app, it would really be worth it to also update to version X6 for Macintosh.

The X3 version you are currently using does not include Sync technology - it uses something older called “Transfer to EndNote Web” - which is, admittedly, clunky - and has been much-improved and replaced with “Sync.”

EndNote uses a cloud-based Sync model that requires an EndNote Web account - although you never actually have to use the EndNote Web interface if you don’t want to. Instead EndNote Web will simply act as a behind-the-scenes way to synchronize the work from your iPad to your Macintosh. Sync also lets you move both your biblioraphic records and PDF file attachements across platforms with one click of a button.

Otherwise, I am afraid that using Sync for half of the process and Transfer for the other will wind up getting very frustrating very fast. 

I hope this helps.

Jason Rollins, the EndNote team

You are probably correct that an update might fix the issue.

I’m going to email you about my specific circumstances, since even after I updated to X6, I am still having issues with sync.

Thanks.

In fact, you can only search the Title, Author and Publication fields. “Everything” searches all three fields, but no others. Well, under certain circumstances it seems to search the keywords field, but not always. Not sure what determines that, but it is not the user, anyway.

This makes EndNote for iPad useless for research purposes: I use the Abstract, Label, Notes and Research Notes fields for adding information that I rely upon later to be able to search, but Endnote for iPad does not search those fields, and does not give the user an option for searching them. Until I am able to specify which fields I wish to be able to search, the only point of this app for me will be so as to look up a reference whose author or title I can remember, or to forward a citation to a colleague by email. Both are useful functions, but only a fraction of what I use EndNote to do.

There is an issue with indexing and searching certain fields in the iPad app. We are beta testing a fix for this now and hope to submit it to Apple in the next few days.

Jason Rollins, the EndNote team