Review of or Comments on EndNote X5 Mac

EndNote EndNote General
1

Hello,

I was a fairly heavy user of EndNote Mac up to about vX.0.2. I have now upgraded to Mac OS X v10.6.8, and have the opportunity to update to EndNote Mac X5, or switch to an alternative manager.

I was unable to find any serious reviews of EndNote X5 using Google. I’d be grateful if anyone pointed out such a review; and even more grateful for any comments regarding the usability of EndNote X5 Mac.

I say ‘usability’, because the glimpses I’ve had so far of later versions than the one I used are not encouraging. EN seems to be affected by a sort of creeping obesity – I understand that X5 is ten times bigger than X – as well as bouts of awful slowness. I also understand that some functions have been crippled or removed – for instance, I’m told that users can no longer edit the absolute paths of PDF attachments, which, IMHO, is simply daft.

For my purposes, I have to assume I’ll have only intermittent Internet access, so I have no interest in EndNote Web and any other on-line features, except for searching remote databases on occasion.

Thanks in advance.

2

X4 is an excellent product. I see no real advantages with X5 (some rudimentary PDF capabilities are added) and one huge downside: X5 is terribly slow on some machines (running Lion). I tried it and returned to X4 instantly. It has memory leaks like crazy. Otherwise the two products seem/feel identical. X4 is better than its predecessors and nothing else comes close.

3

Thank you for your reply.

Is it a fact that paths of PDF attachments cannot be edited (except by exporting and re-importing)?