New features on EndNote X4 for Mac are worse than X3 features

I’m starting to use EndNote X4 for the Mac and writing my first paper with it.  The new Edit & Manage Citations interface is less usable than the old one on X3.  What’s worse?  The old one used to bring up citations where you left your cursor in the document.  Naturally, that’s where you would expect to start editing citations, right?  Well, the folks at Thompsons don’t think so.  When you click on Edit Citations, you start out at the top of your document no matter where your cursor was when you clicked the command.  Now, in a long document, that starts you searching down a long list of citations in the interface to get where you were before  you clicked the command.  This is really a step back in usability.  Also, if for any reason you click an actual citation in a document you end up at the back of the document with all the references highlighted.  What is the advantage of this new “feature”?  Beats me!

As far as I can see, these are definitely not improvements.  They made it much more difficult to finish this paper.

Thanks for the feedback. I can say that what you describe was not the intended behavior with the new Edit & Manage Citations dialog and we are investigating the issue right now.

 - Mathilda, the EndNote team

My experience with EndNote X4 (Mac) amd Word 2008 is slightly different, but just as frustrating.

I started with a 30+ page test document (with no references in the document), and inserted citations at random points in the text.

I find that when I right click on an in-text citation (page 6) and edit it to include page numbers or a prefix etc., the document / cursor immediately jumps to a different place (page 17) in the document as soon as I click on OK to confirm the changes.

This makes the edit citation function in CWYW unworkable in longer documents.