When inserting figures into a Word document any formatting in the caption is lost. This is very surprising given the number of scientists who must be using species names which are normally in italics. It means that when the paper is finished the author has to convert to plain text and amend each caption. Could we please have the same rules as apply to the title field in the caption field?
I think you are beating a dead horse. The Word facilities are so superior to Endnote, that I recommend you use them for captioning. Developers of Endnote long ago stopped tweaking the insert figures part of the software. They found very few users used it - but have learned from previous mistakes of removing aspects of the program that some users still use, and left what was developed in place. (P.S. I have nothing to do with the company.)
follow on question then: in your view, is this a program with a future? Given the increasing importance and usage of images of all kinds, across research and writing in all fields, is Thomson actually deciding to hold the view “we tried that before and it didn’t work”?
This is 2011; the vast majority of images are digital; reproduction of images, even in color, has become cost-effective and therefore increasingly pervasive; images are readily available via the web, but need to retain proper attribution when used; GIS is increasingly critical, also across all fields, and therefore maps are increasingly pervasive; and finally, Visual Literacy is now a concern around the world, in all areas and levels of academics.
If EndNote will not address these needs, by making the Reference templates more friendly to image management and caption development, and by improving the interface between Word and EndNote, I will make X5 my last version.
Since you are asking me, another user, – the role of Endnote is not an image management software. It is a bibliographic software, so no, I don’t think the future is affected by this choice. I applaud them for avoiding expanding the software into an area that bloats it even further.
I haven’t seen any other product that has combined the bibliographic piece and the image management piece, much less done so effectively. Why, since you only add an image with a specific legend, to a single publication, would you want a database of the images hardwired to a caption?
Just my two cents, since you asked.
hmm. Thanks for the reply. I want to clarify: I didn’t mean image management as in image manipulation. I am asking for better attribution management for image-based intellectual property. That is, I think, what EndNote does?
Image-based source materials are no longer solely illustrations. Journals now no longer limit print to black and white; images are prolific and inexpensive and are data-rich sources for investigation. Even in just the past 3 years, GIS-managed demographic information on ESRI or Google Earth maps has become part of almost any scientific research you can imagine; user-created or web-accessed photographs, participant-provided drawings or maps, satellite images and historical photographs or maps are now intrinsic parts of the research method, data or findings across all fields, in the same way that ideas, quotes, and approaches of others are used in our work.
And images must be similarly referenced, and formatted in accordance with publishers guidelines just as the text, line graphs or statistical tables produced with SPSS are. The reader must know the rightful source of intellectual property; the owner of that property must feel confident that proper attribution is being made, and the writer must provide peer reviewers and others relying on her work with the opportunity to verify that work. These images are shared in the same manner as text-based source material, they require appropriate citation and referencing just as legal citations, passages in books and journals, or text from famous speeches are.
Many of these can have very involved captions, with source and copyright/permissions information required; there are all manner of publicly available images requiring at least Creative Commons attribution. AND, many of us use image management software, .e.g. Aperture or Photoshop, which captures (and allows batch editing and export) of exif and IPTC data. It isn’t hard to get this information exported and the fields for each record formatted for import into Endnote as any number of existing Reference Types (figure, map, artwork, audiovisual material, etc.). But why must this information then be manually entered into the document I am writing? This at best creates double/triple work for the researcher; at worst, introduces the likelihood of errors during double-entry of data, and mistakes when submitting manuscripts to publishers. And, since each Journal has its own requirements, the fields used are different in the same way that MLA, APA and Oxford Art Journal are different.
EndNote already has, and advertises as such, the ability to store the image and all manner of related source information, as well as an export routine tied to a publication style for placement of the image in Word using CWYW; here, it has no trouble exporting and formatting appropriate reference information for the specified publication style via Style templates, to manage the output style of footnotes, in-line citations and reference lists. It already has the data in usable fields, available for export. All that is missing is a captioning function that allows styles specified by publishers to be followed, and a user-defined ability to modify which fields from the data record should be included with the exported image via the Output Style Manager. If this is available for footnotes, citations and references, is it really a stretch for Thomson to make this available for Image Captions? Just like reference information, it is a string of related, and specified fields, differing by publisher/publication style.
How is that Bloat? And please don’t tell me it can’t be done; I’ve worked with relational databases and custom reports plenty. Just tell me what it would take to do it. And ask me if I’d pay for it. My answer is YES!
I guess I just haven’t been confronted with the type of entries you envision. And things are in pretty much of a flux, but I can see that the developers should keep an eye on this area, for furture enhancements.
That would be GREAT!
I would be more than happy to provide additional information, or examples. Another source would be the new Sage Handbook of Visual Research Methods. It was published this year, and is a rich source for ways that image-based research is being done, as well as examples of the kinds of sources for images and information being used across a range of fields. And as another example, I’ve included a screen shot, from the field of Archeology, where the photographer and the database source are cited after the actual descriptive text.
Thanks again for the followup.
Happy New Year!
