X4 PDF Import: Missing features?

EndNote EndNote How To
1

EndNote X4’s PDF import feature could be very useful.

However, citations downloaded from PubMed have significant advantages such as consistency of style, inclusion of an abstract, keywords, etc.

Can anyone think of a way to merge citations (not libraries) so that references downloaded from PubMed and those automatically generated by EndNote could be fused together? Even a manual means of pairing citations to merge would be very useful.

I no longer have X3 installed, but if I remember correctly, X3 and previous versions that supported PDF file attachments allowed the PDF files to be dragged and dropped between citations in EndNote. X4 does not allow PDF file attachments to be dragged and dropped (anymore).

Without either of the above features, I do not think that the new PDF import facilities of EndNote X4 unfold their full potential.

2

The addition of importing meta data from a PDF you already have a copy of, or PDFs in a folder is an additional feature of X4, not a replacement of previous mechanisms of obtaining records.  

You still can download citations from PubMed, and you can still find full text, and download and attach PDFs to those records.

X4 does have a manual method to merge duplicates. When you run the Find Duplicates, it shows the two records side by side.  While you can now copy text from one to the other (which wasn’t possible in X3), you can’t copy the PDF “icon” from one to the other. So no you can’t drag a drop PDFs from one record to the other, but can drag and drop from a computer folder or desktop location to a record.   It was never possible to drag a PDF from one record to the other in  X3 or any earlier versions either.    

3

The current method of manually coping over the information or relinking pdfs from the desktop works if there are only one or two files. I have thousands. So if anyone could figure out a way to merge references or simply transfer the pdf file, I would really appreciate it.