Over the last month, I imported about 1,000 citations from Google Scholar. Despite trying to avoid importing duplicate citations by searching my libraries (82,000 citations) for the first author’s last name for many of the candidate citations, I was shocked to find that more than 10% of the citations that I imported and added abstracts keywords and pdfs to were actually duplicates. That meant that, follwing a duplicates search, I had to assess which one of each pair I wanted to keep (based on completness of citation, presence of an abstract or attached pdf, etc). Then I had to delete the duplicated pdf from my folder.
Also, when importing a citation from Google Scholar, there are no periods following the author’s initials. Importations directly from certain journals lack a comma after the authors last name as well. Marine Ecology Progress Series is an example of the latter.
This is an incredible waste of my time. I know Google and EndNote have some differences, but it is time to reconcile these issues. I really don’t care whose problem it is at the front end, when I import a citation, it becomes my problem. I have been a Reference Manager and EndNote user since the late 1980s. Reference Manager was initially a superior product until it was neglected to death.
Also, EndNote needs to find a better way for users to type in diacritical marks, etc. This is espeically annoying when i want to search by an author’s name, and it has a diacritical mark (etc.).