I noticed that in EN6, there is a handy new feature that creates a temporary group containing the citations for the MS Word document that I have open. Is there a way to save or otherwise use that group (and if not what is the point of having it)?
What I would like to have is a group where I collect all the information that I potentially want to used in my document, but then be able to sift through what has, and has not, been included. So if I had a group with all 70 references for my paper and I had already inserted footnotes for 50 of them, I would like to see the subset of 20 that remain.
I tried making a “group from groups” implementing that logic, but the temporary group is not available for inclusion in a rule. I suspect this is by design but if you can suggest a work around that would be helpful.
sure - select them and copy them to a new (reusable) group (which you could later delete the refs from and add the new “set”)? Alternatively, you could select that temporary group and then “change field” (in Endnote, tools, Change/Move/Copy Field) and add a unique text-word to each record (using the replace version and an unused field) and set up a smart search for that word in that field.
The point of having a temporary (aka Auto-Group) of the items cited in a currently open MS Word document is so users can keep track of the items they are using in their current manuscript - as they are writing and citing in it. This is, by definition, dynamic and temporary.
I am curious what would you expect the behavior of the “Groups from Groups” function to be if it included temporary Auto-Groups? Knowing that the Auto-Groups will disappear when Word or EndNote close as they represent a dynamic link between the two applications. Personally, I think your use case makes sense and is something we would like to accommodate but I am struggling with the implications of the Auto-Groups disappearing from the “Groups from Groups” equation.
I think the suggestion by Leanne is doable, albeit a tad more clunky that I had hoped, but as a work around it will probably do the trick.
As for Jason’s query, I guess I don’t know (precisely) what the function should be. I tend to just dive in and start writing, dropping in citations as I go. If that was all I did, EN would be a perfect tool but alas questions come to mind as I write which forces me back into PubMed to drill a bit deeper into the basic science. As I find new tidbits I add those articles to my working group but then struggle to remember which ones I have fully incorporated into my manuscript and which I need to add later.
I suppose the solution is to have a custom group that is static and does not disappear when I close EN. If Word can remember which EN citations I have linked to, I would think EN could remember which I had included in my bibliography (although that might not be a trivial piece of programming). Could we have a feature where a permament group is created by referencing an MS Word document (or documents) just like we have the ability to make up a smart group with particular set of keywords? I don’t know what it would take to have EN query a document on a disk versus reading the links from volatile memory, but it is something to think about.
I guess you are thinking from a perspective of someone is writing one document at a time. I have multiple papers underconstruction at any one time. Students, post-docs, who work with me, who use their library, or my library… I would find such a group association a waste of my computer resources and screen space. (so developers, if you do respond, make it an option!)
I suggest that when you add a new resource, you might add it to a group and move it over or out when you use it? Or use that otherwise useless “feature” that rates the records, and use various ratings (but can you search on that, I think you can sort on it?) to indicate used unused…
Yes, you can search on rating but I agree that it is otherwise a pretty useless feature! Easy enough to turn off, but when you rely on something that might get changed in the future then . . . bad things happen.
You are correct that I tend to write one document at a time, albeit very large and complicated documents (almost always over 50 pages, and sometimes a lot more). I finally cobbled together a solution that sort of works by creating three groups:
Topic
Topic, but already used
Group of groups that shows the difference (i.e. unused).
I have to keep copying the citations from the automatically created group linked to my paper into the “Used” group. This is not the end of the world, but tedious. The other annoyance with the automatically created group is that it doesn’t recreate itself unless you add a citation. So, if I close Word and EN at the end of the day an reopen the next morning I have to add a dummy citation (and then delete it) to restablish the group as EN has no way of knowing which papers I have open unless I activate CWYW manually.
And I am all for making most new features of any software “optional”. That goes for EN, Microsoft, and all the rest!