A plea from sente orphans

EndNote EndNote General
17

Good news, tech support found a way to keep all the attached PDFs!

Pavithra from tech support came up with this workaround, and I modified it to account for multiple PDFs.

When Sente exports to the EndNote XML format, the file attachment information gets exported to a field in the XML file that imports into the URL field for EndNote. This is just how Sente exports to EndNote XML.

However I was able to come up with a workaround to convert the URL field to File attachments field in EndNote. However this workaround will apply only if you have both the programs on the same system.

To Export from Sente:

  1. Open your Sente database
  2. Click on the File menu and select Export
  3. Pick a name and location for the export file
  4. Change the Format to EndNote XML
  5. Click Export

To Import to EndNote:

  1. Open EndNote and create a new library (File > New) or open an existing EndNote library (File > Open Library)
  2. Click on the File menu and select Import
  3. Browse to the XML file you exported from Sente
  4. Change the Import Option to EndNote Generated XML
  5. Click Import

Once done please follow the steps below to link the PDF to the EndNote library:

  1. Now you have the imported references in EndNote. Highlight all the references and go to File>Export and choose RefMan RIS import filter save the text file on desktop.

  2. Now open this text file using TextEdit and click on Edit>Find> Find and Replace.

  3. In the Find button enter UR  -

  4. In the Replace field type in L1  -
    Note- please leave two spaces between UR and the dash, and between L1 and the dash.

  5. Replace All and save the text file.
    ** If you have references with more than one link, you’ll need to do this, otherwise only the first link will work:
       Find “file:///” and replace with “L1  - file:///”, leaving two spaces between L1 and - as above: this will add the second, third, etc. attachments but break the first ones, you will fix this in the next step.  Replace All.
       Find “L1  - L1  -” and replace with “L1  -”, leaving two spaces between L1 and - as above: this will fix the first attachments. Replace All, and save the text file.

  6. Open EndNote and create a new library. Now import the text file using the RefMan RIS filter.

  7. This library will have all the references with file attachments.

  8. Now you can save a copy of this library and convert the absolute links to relative links so that you can move this library across different computers.

  9. To do so, highlight all the references and click on References tab and File Attachments>Convert to Relative Links. This will convert the links to relative. This step may take a while.

I used this workaround to import my 10,000 reference library, each with 1 or 2 PDFs, and only 37 links didn’t work - these were mostly corrupt PDFs I hadn’t noticed yet.

1 Like