When the number of references in endnote become large, it is better to annotate each paper about citation information (what papers cite a given paper and what papers are cited by it). I’m wondering if there is a convenient way to include this information. Thank you!
I know what you mean, but it is currently beyond the capacity of Endnote. ISI (part of Thomson-Reuter, I believe) gets such information, and publish so called “impact factors” of each journal and each article, the information is not freely available. Besides, how would you have all the papers that cite one particlular paper in your local database? Your library will grow exponentially and will be uncotrollable.
I agree, electronic databases hosted thru the internet are the better way to provide this kind of information. Some of these are proprietary (Scopus, Web of Science), but you can get to who cited whom via some publicly accessible websites. for example, you can find out which papers cite a specific paper in google scholar and Pubmed. Unfortunately I am not sure there are any free resources to link to cited papers from a paper.
@myoshigi wrote:
I know what you mean, but it is currently beyond the capacity of Endnote. ISI (part of Thomson-Reuter, I believe) gets such information, and publish so called “impact factors” of each journal and each article, the information is not freely available. Besides, how would you have all the papers that cite one particlular paper in your local database? Your library will grow exponentially and will be uncotrollable.
I think that you partially but not completely understand what I mean. Suppose that I start with an empty endnote library file. As time goes by, the references in the library will grow. But I only keep the paper that actually read in the library, so it will not grow exponentially because the number of paper that I can read per unit time is supposedly a constant.
Now, let us say my endnote library grows to a size of a few hundred references. At this moment, it become really hard to remember which paper is related with which paper. But if there is an automatic way to generated the information on which paper cites which paper and which paper is cited by which paper, it will make my life easier. Which this kind of annotation, I can group papers that are related and read them altogether, which might help me conceive new insights. The new insights may not be possible to conceive if I don’t read the related papers together.
I hope that I make what I mean clear. Thank you!
Now I know what you mean clearly. However, I am a little bit against to “automate” such information. You know in science, or whoever we are, some reference list contains more than necessary, and contains very irrelevant papers. Unfortunately bibliography information is a mixed bag. There are some gems, there are some garbage. Some people cite all the papers from their own lab, regardless of the contents are relevant or not, and fill the half of the reference with the papers from their own lab. But sometimes that’s the way should be. How would you be able to automate the decision, which is one is critical citation, which one is not? Senior author’s name? Maybe no. The only and best way is you decide which one is important citation, which one is not. If we automate citation information, including everything like self-referencing, method reference, etc, the information will become more and more meaningless.
I usually prefer to do this type of task with the group function in Endnote. You can have group sets now, so tree structure organizing is another help with EN X3.
At least that’s what I believe, and I spend huge deal of time reading papers, and downlod only selected papers for the entry of Endnote and PDF files. By doing so, even with ~6000 paper entries, I still find my main library as a good platform to find most of the information I need. If somebody ask me like “do you know papers like…?” then I can find them in a few seconds in my library, or at least I can tell I have or not.
Endnote does not store or cross reference citations information. This would require some sort of large relational database, at the very least.
And – this is very complicated. ISI’s citation index tries to eliminate some of the bias that but it isn’t perfect.
In addition to the ISI Web of Knowledge and Elselvier’s Scopus applications (which again require subscription), consider CiteSeer. Or look up the CLADDIER project which I think is proposing at an institutional level, something along the lines you are proposing.
There are other “network based” aggregators that I remember hearing about, where it would display dots of papers that had similar word usage or keywords clustered visually, but I can’t see to put my finger on these. Anyone else remember or use that kind of resource?
@myoshigi wrote:
Now I know what you mean clearly. However, I am a little bit against to “automate” such information. You know in science, or whoever we are, some reference list contains more than necessary, and contains very irrelevant papers. Unfortunately bibliography information is a mixed bag. There are some gems, there are some garbage. Some people cite all the papers from their own lab, regardless of the contents are relevant or not, and fill the half of the reference with the papers from their own lab. But sometimes that’s the way should be. How would you be able to automate the decision, which is one is critical citation, which one is not? Senior author’s name? Maybe no. The only and best way is you decide which one is important citation, which one is not. If we automate citation information, including everything like self-referencing, method reference, etc, the information will become more and more meaningless.
I usually prefer to do this type of task with the group function in Endnote. You can have group sets now, so tree structure organizing is another help with EN X3.
At least that’s what I believe, and I spend huge deal of time reading papers, and downlod only selected papers for the entry of Endnote and PDF files. By doing so, even with ~6000 paper entries, I still find my main library as a good platform to find most of the information I need. If somebody ask me like “do you know papers like…?” then I can find them in a few seconds in my library, or at least I can tell I have or not.
Thank you, I can at least try grouping. I have EN X1. Is tree structure the newly added functionin EN X3? Will there be network structure be added in future version of EN?
Just to make sure. There isn’t a way to even manually input the citation information in EN, right?
Tree structure: Yes, it is the feature added to X3. I think group function itself appeared first in X or X1. At that time, the number of groups I could make was 50 or something, which was quite lame. Now, I can make 500 groups, and can put them in tree structure, but only one level.
Network structure: I don’t know what you mean, but if you indicate relational database structure, answer is negative. Developer claimed that EN is a relational database since ver 5 or 8 (can’t remember) saying “Term Lists” are related to library. That’s true, but it doesn’t have the depth of true relational database. It is still kind of “text handling” tool. However, you can request features. Like tree structures and other changes, users here voiced, and developers listened. So, this is a good place you could voice yourself.
Manual input: Yes, you can. Use custom field or Research Note field to enter whatever you feel useful to categorize your references. When you do that, I recommend to make custom term list so that you don’t mis-type information.