X4 Wish List

[myoshigi]

Now X3 is officially released. Let’s post some features we requested in the past, but not yet included in X3. Or, you can bring some past threads up by replying.

I’ll re-write some of my requests, and some by others as far as I can remember.

1. Ability to search a reference that belong to certain combination of groups. For example, I want to find reference(s) that belong to group A AND/OR group B. Current “Search Library” does not have “group name” as a selectable field. It seems simple to include the “group name” in the search. Also, if I can do this by clicking on group name with shift (for AND) or control (for OR), that’ll be nice.

2. Left align “Bibliography Title”. I rarely use this function, but formatting allows bibliography title automatically entered through “Layout” tab, but the title comes out only in the center aligned format. That’s limited. Why only center? There should be left aligned as well.

3. Copy field function (by Leanne). This allows us to make duplicates of field data. Sometimes, I want to modify my custom field by “Change text” or “Modify field” feature, but I want to keep field data before the modification, just in case I do something wrong. Currently, work around is to make a backup copy of the entire library.

4. Distinguish field names from other formatting text (space, punctuations, texts, etc) in the Bibliography style template (by TuStue). Right now, the bibliography template looks just plain text, and it is hard to see where is comma, space, and distinguish them from field names. If field names are grayed and non-editable, it’ll be easier to edit style template. Using color to do this may be an option, but that’ll be an issue with color blind users.

5. Highlight references that are cited in the Word document (by MvP14 and voted by many others). If we can do this, we can check and see if we missed important citations in the document or not. This function may be accomplished from the tool bar in Word. A button like “Highlight references in EN cited in this document” would be nice.

6. Link citations in the Word document back to EN (by Leanne and many others). Sounds like similar to #5 but actually different. Sometimes, we want to check and edit the Endnote references from the citations in the Word. Sometimes we want to open full text PDF files directly from the citations in Word. “Edit citations - More…” option allows me to check the reference, but not to edit. If we can individually select citation, and choose right click menu and “Go to Endnote reference” or “Open full text PDFs”, that’ll be nice.

This feature is accomplished by “Edit Reference” from the tool bar in Word. “Open full text PDF” from Word still might be helpful.

7. Robust (or user defined, editable) keyboard short cut. I’m not a big fan of keyboard short cut, but many have requested (and complained) about EN’s lack of robust keyboard short cut.

8. Ability to display/batch edit file path in the attachment field (requested by me, PaulK and others). Currently, only icon is shown in the attachment field. We want to see them as path names as well. When we change the folder name or location of attachments (including PDF full texts), some links to attachments in EN are lost. We need to batch edit path names of attachment, by using Find/replace text function. Also, “relink this attachment” for individual lost link would be necessary, like the relinking short cut in Windows OS.

There should be many more, so please add your own requests or bring some favorite threads up!

Message Edited by myoshigi on 06-21-2009 07:49 AM

Message Edited by myoshigi on 06-24-2009 06:47 PM

Message Edited by myoshigi on 09-18-2009 08:03 AM

[myoshigi]

Ability to place author(s) in front of in-text citation.

We often want to start a sentence with author and citation, like Smith et al. (1) investigated that …blah blah blha.

We can “exclude” author from “Edit Citations” right click menu, but if we have “Place author in front” option, then we do not need to type ourselves. I think this is a relatively easy fefature EN can add.

Message Edited by myoshigi on 06-24-2009 06:51 PM

[myoshigi]

Suport for regular expression (including wild cards like ? or *) in the search. Probably, single line search using AND/OR/NOT boolean texts.

This allows us to do ambiguous search. This is a standard feature in many operating systems, text editors, etc, but it’s been missing in EN for years.

Message Edited by myoshigi on 06-24-2009 06:50 PM

[mtcerio]

@myoshigi wrote:

 

1. Ability to search a reference that belong to certain combination of groups. For example, I want to find reference(s) that belong to group A AND/OR group B. Current “Search Library” does not have “group name” as a selectable field. It seems simple to include the “group name” in the search. Also, if I can do this by clicking on group name with shift (for AND) or control (for OR), that’ll be nice.

This one is essential to me. Hope we can get it!

Thanks

Matteo

[jasonr]

This something that we are currently working on and hope to include in EndNote version X4.

Jason Rollins, the EndNote team

[mtcerio]

@jasonr wrote:

This something that we are currently working on and hope to include in EndNote version X4.

 

Jason Rollins, the EndNote team

Good to know Jason! Thanks for answering!

Hope we’ll be able to have it soon!

Cheers

maTTeo

[araragi]

I would also very much like to see item #1 included in the next release of EndNote.

[roberttu]

I also need feature #1 urgently. I want to transform groups to keywords and then use smart groups to cluster my literature.

[myoshigi]

9. Section formatting with OpenOffice.org Writer

This function may help graduate students who’s writing thesis, but doesn’t have access to MS Word. I believe section format currently works only with MS Word, doesn’t it?

[lizmari]

Thank you for the compare duplicates feature in X3!  For that alone it is worth the upgrade from X2 (and being able to group groups - very nice addition!).  It is a huge improvement on previous versions, most notably X2 which didn’t even show the duplicate records next to each other. 

It would be convenient to be able to edit the fields in the “compare duplicates” window.  For example I had two duplicate records, one with the PDF and one with the abstract; I wanted to copy the abstract over to the record with the PDF, but to do this had to exit the “find duplicates” feature, find the records, and make the change by opening one record, copying the abstract, closing that record, opening the other record, and pasting the abstract, and then performing a “search for duplicate records” again to contiue with my duplicates purging task.  Being able to accomplish this in the “compare duplicates” window would be a huge timesaver!  Thanks!

[drarlek]

Hi, I started a thread a while ago in the How To forum about a desirable feature, “Linkingcitation to references section in Word and PDF.” The basic idea is to have the in-text citation a hot-link to the associated reference in the bibliography. Others expressed interest in this, and I was advised to repeat the request in this forum. Thanks.

[tostue]

Thanks for X3 and the possibility to have a library in each section - I just used it for an edited book, where several authors had to fill in the gaps in their bibliography parts of the book.

Thanks for myoshigi for repeating the Output Style highlighting feature request. I still would highly appreciate it to be added to the next version!

I have another quite difficult question regarding an extension to EndNote.

Request # 1

I have a lot of colleagues and I need it myself, who write in German/English and use Non-German/Non-English literature, esp. Russian, Georgian, Armenian etc. When you write in German and want to use some russian books, you have 3 types of titles (and if it is a book section - book title as well, etc.): the russian original, a scientific transcription/transliteration of the russian letters and a german translation. If you want to publish the same text in English, you need a 4th field for the english translation.

Right now I am trying to solve this problem using translated author and a custom field - [german] translation, which works more or less, but is not very smooth.

I would like to suggest to kind of combine entries, which are just in another language, maybe via a special field. So a full set of fields would be available in each language and via the output style i can choose, which field from which language version should be used in a special case.

Example: We used in the footnote: [transcribed] Author, [German] Title, p.

In the bibliography at the end of the book: [transcribed] Author, [transcribed] Title, ([transcribed] Author, [German] Title)

I hope you understand, what I am trying to achieve. If not, feel free to contact me or ask, I would be happy to help!

Request #2

In the Citations, Footnotes and Bibliography you can choose, how you want Author to appear: With initials, without etc. In my Bibliography I have to show, how a special reference is cited in the footnote. Since I use only “Smith/Doe” in the footnote, but “Smith, J./Doe, J.” in the bibliography, all my authors are where I give an example on how I cited them appear with initials, although I haven’t used them. 

It would be great, if I could somehow influence this.

---

Thanks a lot!

[tostue]

I have a couple of smaller suggestions for one of the next versions:

1

Remove limitation of reference types and allow to add as much as you need.

#2 

Improve backup function: If I want to backup my library, I have to make an enlx, save the reference types, styles, filters, connections go seperately as well - this is quite complicated and should be much easier. Just one click and another user should be able to import all changes I made

[drarlek]

When a search is performed, it would be  nice to have the search term(s) highlighted in the Preview window. I usually look at search hits with an Output style that includes the abstract; if the search term was highlighted in the abstract, I could quickly scan a hit and see if it is relevant. Now it takes a lot of time. Many search engines do this, including Google (when you look at the html version of a pdf, for example) and Firefox.

Thanks.

[myoshigi]

1. Right now, the order of group sets can be organized by dragging them up and down. Groups inside the group set are organized only with alphabetical order. If I can sort and re-organize groups by dragging them up and down, that would be nice.

2. From the right click menu for each reference, “Add Reference to” sub-menu expands all the group names. If I have several hundreds of groups, I have to scroll all the way down to find what I need. So, this sub-menu is very much useless for me. If the sub-menu has a expandable/collapsible cascade structure that would be useful.

3. This may be a limitation at this moment, but whe I click on the name of a group set, it doesn’t change the highlight to the group set. Highlight is still on “All refefences” or somewhere else. I guess clicking on the name of the group set should highlight the name of the groups set, but when it does, it should display all the references that belong to the clicked group set. This actually requires the feature to display references that belong to multiple groups with “OR” operator. Anyway, clicking on the name of a group set while not changing the highlight is a little bit weird interface.

Message Edited by myoshigi on 10-21-2009 08:05 PM

[drarlek]

Unfortunately, “Go To” only works on a record when it is opened in Edit mode, not when one is browsing a list of search results in Library mode, which kind of defeats the purpose of what I am asking for. But thanks for pointing the feature out.

[myoshigi]

Following up my own “maybe personal” requests.

4. Currently, the number of my custom groups is reaching to 420. I know up to 500 custom groups can be made, so I’ll have 80 more. For Endnote users more than 10 years experience, I’m pretty much sure these folks are dealing with library with several thousands. When it comes to how we organize these references into small groups, 500 groups may not be enough. I believe 1000 or unlimited number of groups is better for these users.

[mims]

I am writing in Entrepreneurship / Business. This request below is essential for me as well, especially for the passages in which I want to emphasise the authors.

I am using OpenOffice on a Mac and Cite As You Write is not supported. It would be good to have this function also supported for RTF scan. I have tried to alter the output style by cutting the brackets and then insert the brackets manually in the text. Eg {Yin, #23}'s ({, 2009 #23}) idea of replication logic…

But then EndNote puts a comma after the name of the author(s)…

@myoshigi wrote:

Ability to place author(s) in front of in-text citation.

 

We often want to start a sentence with author and citation, like Smith et al. (1) investigated that …blah blah blha.

We can “exclude” author from “Edit Citations” right click menu, but if we have “Place author in front” option, then we do not need to type ourselves. I think this is a relatively easy fefature EN can add.

Message Edited by myoshigi on 06-24-2009 06:51 PM

Message Edited by mims on 11-01-2009 03:09 PM

[johneast]

Unfortunately it isn’t that easy. For example, the APA manual specifies that if a reference has four authors, you either cite it as:

Bradley et al. (2006)…

Or:

… (Bradley, Ramirez, Soo, & Walsh, 2006) …

In other words, the format of the author names depends on whether you are citing the authors in the text of the paper or within a parenthetical citation. 

[myoshigi]

I agree that it isn’t easy, with it’s current temporary citation scheme. When we look at the unformatted text, we find EN simply uses {, year record#} to format the in-text citation without author. Writers then need to manual type in the author before the citation, which is not bad at all to me (imagine how many seconds are necessary to do that).

But if Endnote wants to address all the users’ & publishers’ complicated requests, the author(s) ahead of the in-text citation need to be formatted by Endnote’s output style. It probably requires full logics (number of authors, separators, et al. yes or no) that are used to format authors for the in-text citation.

After all thoughts, enhancement to the “Edit citation” command could be:

Ability to format in-text citation such as :

Kruger et al. (2007) hypothesized that …

or

Kruger et al. hypothesized that …

The underlined parts should be “greyed” when I click them, meaning they are dictated by field codes of output style and Edit citation command.

Well…I’m writing this, against my personal preference of not using this type of in-text citation, but it’s kind of fun to think about future versions of Endnote.