EndNote X9 extremely slow on MacOS 10.13

I’m in the process of ordering several licences of EndNote for my research group.

I just installed a trial version of EndNote X9 on my MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018), which has 2.9 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i9 and a memory of 16 GB 2400 MHz DDR4.

EndNote is already slow and crashing, thus not giving a good first impression.

Yes, unfortunately EndNote for the past two major version upgrades seems mostly to have been abandoned as far as performance issues are concerned. They make a couple of aesthetic changes, slap a new version number on it, and try to charge folks a hefty pricetag for it. What is worse, some people who have purchased EN 20 have said they’ve actualy begun taking away certain capabilities!

X7 was the last version that really worked well for me and if I could just dust it off and make it work for Big Sur and the current version of Word, I would. Since then, versions have given me beachballs, freezing, sluggishness, etc. A real mess that I am positive could easily be reproduced on the machines used to beta-test by the developers. It honestly seems they literally just can’t be bothered anymore.

Unfortunately, this is not a trajectory that is specific to EndNote, whose intellectual property rights/brand has changed hand from one large company to another at least a few times in the past decade. There’s a tendency to milk good products of every last drop of revenue while maintaining skeletal support and occasionally releasing nominally “new” releases to project the image that the product isn’t Abandonware.

I’m not holding out much hope for a major turn-about anytime in the near future, and that’s just sad.

Check out Bookends. Or any of a number of options that have more features than EN and are actually maintained and improved. I gave up bc endnote’s developers are getting either indifferent or have no clue how to actually work with us users towards a solution. I abandoned ship and am dumbfounded I hadn’t done it sooner as I should have. 

Thanks, I’ll certainly be giving that product and some other alternatives careful consideration. For the time being, I’m sticking with EN, though if things continue the way they have been for the past several years, that won’t be the case for much longer. One has only so much patience, after all.