Track usage

I think that a useful feature for Endnote would be the ability to track the usage of citations in the database. That is, Endnote would keep track of when an entry in the database has been used in Word using the CWYW. Even better would be the ability to find where that citations was used (e.g., which Word file).

I frequently put references in my Endnote database for future reference, but never end up using them I’d like to occasionally clean out the database of references that I’ve never used.

Some of what you are suggesting is possible in EndNote version X4. An auto-group is created for any Word or OpenOffice.org Writer document when EndNote references are inserted using CWYW - see the attached screen shot.

As for other ways of tracking usage - numbers/count, etc., we have considered this in the past but have always been stuck on how to account for references that are cited using CWYW and then subsequently deleted in the word processing document. EndNote does not necessarily know if a the citation was deleted so could not really keep an accurate count of how often a given reference has been used.

Jason Rollins, the EndNote team

I hope you don’t mind me following-up this request with a related one.  I’d find it quite useful to be able to get a count of how many times each citation is used in a single paper.  We all can think of times we need to trim the length of a paper.  One way to do so is to trim out superfluous citations that might be used only once or twice. Being able to quickly identify citation used only once would facilitate this process. 

I could imagine a routine that allows you to point at a single document (or a collection of documents) and the result would be a frequency report by citation (might even allow a report by unique author or journal…could be all kinds of neat options).  This might address the question of how to do the CWYW counts (because of subsequent deletions).  Providing a dynamic reporting tool gets around this.   

Thanks,

Tim

EndNote X4 already displays usage and count information for references and citations used in Word documents. See the attached screen shot of the “Edit and Manage Citations” dialog.

Jason Rollins, the EndNote team