At our organization, researchers work and write in teams, e.g., systematic reviews. Also, students work together on team assignments.
EndNote doesn’t work well with supporting these efforts. Currently, some are trying to save an EndNote library to a shared server but the library can only be accessed by a single user.
My questions:
What new features are in the pipeline to address end users’ need to work collaboratively and share a single library?
Are there current solutions or work arounds to address this issue?
If the saved version is write protected multiple users can access it simultaneously. Obviously, they can’t update it though. – So we have two versions – a RW folder that one user can access to update it, and a RO folder that the RW folder is copied to by a script each night/early morning. That works pretty well for our team. I just wish that when someone has the RW version open, Endnote would tell you WHO has it open, so you could easily ask them to close it.
It would be fantastic if we could have copy-paste from EndNote Web to Google Docs and Office365.
This way teams could work/write on the same document at the same time, and they could copy-paste references from their EndNote Web library in the format {author, year, title} (unformatted).
Would be great if you could have an option in EndNote Desktop to also copy-paste references as {author, year, title}. Today you only have option for Label, Accession Number and Pages in Edit > Preferences > Temporary Citations. Strange… This way you could copy-paste references from both EndNote Web and Desktop into Google Docs and Office365.
When done writing, merge all libraries from team, remove duplicates, and format document. Voila!
I think what is required is a completely new vision, in which Endnote hosts manuscripts (on their servers) that can be edited by anyone (a bit like google docs should be). References can be inserted into the document from any endnote database (online or offline), and the online Endnote app tracks the references and allows anyone to download them into their own (online or offline) Endnote database.
Citavi supports “Group Projects” where access can be granted generally to all network participants or with passwords. This works well to support libraries for big projects
We definitely heard you regarding the need for expanded collaboration features in EndNote. Earlier today we released X7.2, an update available at no charge to current X7 users. More info here: http://endnote.com/library-sharing
This release allows users to share their EndNote library with up to 14 other X7.2 users for a collaborative group of 15. Shared libraries provide full read write access to all invited users. We’ve also eliminated the 5 GB storage limitation for syncing libraries, whether or not you chose to share your library. Storage is now unlimited.
Also, there’s no price increase for users buying or upgrading to X7.2 from a previous version of EndNote (X6 or earlier). If you want to try it, you can also download the demo version to give it a spin before you buy.
X7.2 is the first of many releases to the EndNote product line to facilitate collaborative research. Once you’ve tried it out, please let me know what you think.
