I am a medical librarian and intermediate EndNote user. I train patrons on the basics of EndNote. I admit that there is a lot I don’t know yet, though. Hence my current query:
Background: When you do an online search to get references into your library, EndNote puts a url into the citation record. I usually search PubMed. So when EN finds a citation it puts the url where it found it into the cite record. When you use Import to bring in a batch of cites from PubMed, there is no url in the record. This is because of the stupid decision by the NLM not to include a url in the data when you make a text file from their database.
I have a patron who is using “Find Full Text” but he doesn’t really need a full text attachment for every article. He really just wants a quick way to get to full text from his library. Since he’s using Import he has no urls in his library.
The “Find Full Text” doesn’t have a high success rate. I assume this is because for a single article we often have multiple providers, and EndNote cannot make a decision about which link to go to and it freezes. I understand this.
Question: So I’m wondering: is there a way to have EN search for a PubMed url for all of the records in a library? I see there is a menu item “URL” but it just has the option to “OPEN URL LINK” or “OPEN URL.” Is there a “url search” kind of like the full text search?
As for - “The “Find Full Text” doesn’t have a high success rate…” - do your users have their OpenURL and Authentication URLs set-up properly? Using these will enable EndNote to leverage your institution’s subscription credentials. With this in-place EndNote should have a very high success rate finding PDFs of articles from most of the the major databases and STM publishers. See the attached screen.
Q1: do those both those boxes need to be set if the campus has IP authentication? We have the first field filled with the demo address, but the second field is empty. It is also good to select the Pubmed Linkout option, which is not selected in the default settings. That improves our retrieval, but there are still some articles (PLoS One, Cancer Cell) that we do have access to, and which do not always work in full text retrieval.
Q2: but this user request really doesn’t want Full text, they want the URL attached in records where is has not been uploaded - which is sometimes an alternative that Find Full Text might attach, if it can’t locate the pdf?
I am not aware of a way to invoke the retrieval of the URL alone, but it would be another enhancement, along the lines of some of the other requests, (i.e. for DOI retrieval or other fields where the record already exists in the library but you wish to add other information available in the databases, without creating a new record with a new record number.
If you are IP authenticated on campus then you should not need to fill in the second option on this Preference panel.
There is no direct way to just go and retrieve URLs for EndNote records. But if you un-checked all of the Find Full Text options you will likely just get URLs so that may be a way to achieve what is being asked for in this specific case.
