i organize endnote seminars especially for students in medical and natural sciences and discovered a problem regarding references imported from Pubmed and our OpenURL-based linksovler. During the seminar I recommend using the online-search to add references from Pubmed to the library because its pretty fast and reliable.
Many students want to access the full text of the imported references. We use the linksolver from Ovid to manage the electronic serial holdings of our library. So our students and scientists insert the URL of the linksolver in the appropiate box in the preferences menu.
There is a problem with imported references from Pubmed that have more than one ISSN. Many articles have an ISSN for electronic / print / linking. Endnote transfers both ISSNs to the same field “ISSN” and adds a comment in parentheses to both values (see atteched screenshot 1). By right-clicking on the reference and choosing “OpenURL Link” you can open the linksolver in a browser. As you can see in the attached screenshot 2 the linksolver uses both ISSN numbers. None of the services we offer our users can cope with this “combined” and wrong ISSN number and reports, that there is no matching journal. You can delete the second ISSN manually from the reference and everything works fine. But manual editing is an enormous amount of work for large libraries and therfore no satisfactory sollution.
Is it possible to seperate the ISSNs during the import from Pubmed? Have other suggestions how to cope with this problem?
PubMed is exporting two ISSNs with the text in parenthesis:
IS - 1559-1182 (Electronic)
IS - 0893-7648 (Linking)
Since they both using the same IS tag, EndNote will import both of them into the same field. The text in the parenthesis is being exported by PubMed, EndNote is not adding it. You should be able to edit the import filter/connection file to remove them. If you conduct the search from within EndNote you would edit the connection file, if you search using your web browser you would need to edit the import filter. When you open the import filter/connection file for editing you can click on Field Editing. Here you can select the ISSN field and tell it to omit the (Electronic) and (Linking) text.
The text in parentheses is not the problem, the linksolver igonres the text (see screenshot-2). You can manually delete the text, so that only plain ISSN numbers remain in the ISSN-field, and the linksolver has exaclty the same described problem. Is there a way to only import one ISSN from Pubmed or to export only one of two ISSNs to the linksolver via OpenURL syntax?
I managed to import only one ISSN by editing the Pubmed connection file (s. attached screenshot-3). I checked some articles in Pubmed and it seems that every article in Pubmed now has a “linking” ISSN and either an electronic or print ISSN? Was there a major database update that i missed? Or are there articles that only have one ISSN?
btw: How can I add a new tag in the Endnote editing menu for connections files? I had to delete a tag field to get two tag fields for ISSN. The tag was useless because the value was ignored, but there has to be a way to get a new tag field without modyfing an old one.
If you move the cursor to the end of the line and press enter, it should give you a new row. You may want to add an additional tag to cover ISSNs that do not have any text, good work around. You could have it send the Linking ISSN to a different field instead of ignoring it, just incase you need it at some point down the road.
