'New Reference' problem with X7.2

paulbfoley · February 14, 2015, 7:10am

I have asked for an update on this problem in “EndNote General”, but haven’t heard anything. Since the X7.2 update is has been impossible to add a new reference unless all references are showing: that is, after a successful search,

the “New Reference” icon on the toolbar is greyed out and unavailable; Control+N does not work while the icon is greyed out; ‘New Reference’ is also greyed out on the "references’ menu. This is particularly inconvenient if I want to copy one of the search resultsand then paste it into the same library as the basis for a new reference (if I ‘copy’ a reference after a search, ‘paste’ is greyed out in the right-click context menu). But it is also annoying if my search indicates that a sought references has not been entered previously, and I now wish to enter it: once again, I need to select “show all references” to be able to access this basic function of Endnote.

I am aware that I can work around this by having the ‘Groups’ pane open and manually switching between ‘Search Results’ and 'All References"; but this is not only fiddly, I rarely have the Groups pane open, as I generally don’t need it, and it takes up valuable space on my screen I can better use for displaying my library and references.

This ‘new reference’ problem was not resolved by the most recent update; will it be fixed in the near future?

jimmym · February 20, 2015, 11:13pm

Greetings Paul,

After performing your library search and displaying those search results, pressing the keyboard shortcut of Shift + command + M will invoke the Show All References menu item. Afterward, the mentioned command + N shortcut will become active once again to allow for a new library record to be created. Still a workaround solution, but should be speedier than the one you had mentioned in your post.

paulbfoley · February 24, 2015, 7:47am

Thanks for the suggestion, but it is only a workaround, and still not convenient (it’s control-M for me, I use a PC!). Until X7.2 it was possible to duplicate records or enter new ones whenever you wanted, and this would seem to be what you would expect of a program like Endnote, and I don’t understand why it was changed. It seems that Endnote wants to force users to work with the Groups pane if they want to work with search results, but for reasons I have explained before I prefer not to do this. I am just curious as to whether Endnote is looking for a solution that will allow new references to be entered at any time? Alternatively, if a copy of the original X7 could be made available, this would allow me to return to the last version that allowed this.