I am a cancer doc and treat patients. I am farily well published despite being in clinical practice. Early on, EndNote for me was an easy way to reformat bibliographies for submitted publications. NOW, EndNote is an incredibly powerful tool for me to be brought up to latest in new developments both in research and clinical care. But for me, a Mac user, there are too many aspects of EndNote that are ugly/bothersome/pain in the ass/ and yet easily correctable. But like most problems we face in the world, those at a level to effect a change seem not to hear the voices of the customer/client/patient/citizen, etc.
- Make EndNote for Mac users visually acceptable and not so ***edit*** ugly. Color the icons and make the icon design one that informs the user about its function.
- Make the online library of EndNote default to the PubMed search. How many times have I searched to find no results only to realize that I forgot to click on PubMed. Most users use PubMed 90% of the time, so this should be the default selection.
- When I add another search box in the online library or local library, have EndNote automatically resize the shown windows rather than the user having to find the crossbar to drag the window done.
- And speaking of resizing the windows in any view, have this more obvious rather than having to mouse over the area until the user finds it.
- On the local side, restore the ability to drag the File Attachment to the hard drive of the user rather than to “save as” and then have the user find the folder in Finder.
- In the contextual menu when the user clicks on a particular citation there is an option to email, but that only works on one citation at a time. If the user wants to send 2 or more emails to someone then each time this must be done separately.
- I could think of other issues such as ability to use color to annotate the abstract rather than only have bold, underline or bold and underline, but this is not as important as the other 6 recommendations.
- Lastly, I wonder why the Find Full Text sometimes gets bogged down and does not complete the action, and at other times the Find Full Text moves briskly along.
If these issues were addressed I would have no hesitation in saying that EndNote is the most important app on my compouter to enhance patient care. Right now, I am so passionate about EndNote that I recommend it to patients who can interact with other patients and their healthcare practitioners.
Stephen B. Strum, MD, FACP