EndNote X8 Keeps Crashing on Mac

I’ve also found that Endnote crashes whenever I try to create a smart group.

Obviously, this isn’t a new problem.

Neither would it logically have anything to do with MacOS or pdfs. Clearly, the Endnote program has a serious bug.

Time to lift your game Clarivate!

Just adding to the chorus. Endnote seems unusuable on 10.13.3, incredibly slow, now crashing endlessly. Can only imagine if I were trying to do a dissertation with this, I’d defenstrate either myself or the computer. 

Really wanted that Word integration…

So. Here I am struggling with the same problems… Do you guys have feedback on Zotero? EndNote is simply unusable… 

Thanks

EDIT: how long do you think it will take before they fix all of this?

Last Fall I decided to take the plunge and buy a big-screen iPad Pro with iPencil for reading and annotating papers.  Although I was in the throes of writing my dissertation (I still am), I anticipated starting a new project in another academic department at my university, with a new stream of literature to read.  I was somewhat relieved to see that Clarivate (Formerly Thomson Reuters) had quietly removed some of the more objectionable barriers of their iPad EndNote application and that I could finally get some use from it on the iPad.  Later, when I took up my dissertation writing again in early January, I learned of the ‘problems’ with EndNote X8 after I updated my computers to OS X 10.13 High Sierra over the holidays.  Before that OS X update everything worked OK for me with EndNote.  The OS X upgrade necessitated a Microsoft Office 2016 update and following that update everything concerning EndNote unraveled for me.

Usually when a piece of software becomes unreliable on the Mac I assume that it is something that I am doing wrong, but I soon found out that EndNote X8 was an exception.  After failing in my attempt to reverse my upgrade of EndNote X8 back to X7 (my university would not give me a new install code to downgrade EndNote), I tried calling Clarivate to work with them, but the attitude that I got was that EndNote X8’s instability is the fault of Apple and Clarivate is blameless.  Clarivate support’s advice was for me to complain to Apple that they need to fix their OS X pdf kit and downgrade my computer to OS X El Capitan until Apple fixes High Sierra.  Working a new full-time research job, commuting 90 miles per day, and trying to finish a PhD dissertation made that suggestion impractical for me.  Even if I had the time, I wasn’t about to roll back my computer to an old OS because Clarivate either will not or cannot fix their program.

Earlier I looked at Zotero and Mendeley when I got my new iPad Pro.  Both programs’ reliance upon a paid subscription to a web server for file synchronization between the Mac and iPad was off-putting to me.  I had been through that sort of setup previously with Sente and I didn’t like it.  In my opinion, it should be possible to sychronize a Macintosh to an iPad through local wireless without having to buy a subscription (Mekentosj Papers 2 could do it).  Also, it was my impression that Zotero wasn’t especially well-suited to science-related work (I am in chemistry) but rather it is more humanities-focused.  However, that may just be bias on my part.  I really didn’t do much with Mendeley since it appeared to me to just be more of the same (similar to Zotero).

I really wanted to like EndNote Mac because my institution (Virginia Tech) licenses it for all of us and it has been a de-facto standard in the academic community for ages.  However, the EndNote Mac program changes at a glacial pace and as recent experiences prove, not always for the better.  If their telephone support response to me that Apple will have to change OS X is representative of the Clarivate’s position, then EndNote X8 Mac may not get ‘fixed’ until the next version of OS X gets released next Fall.  I base this guess on the assumption that, by then, even Clarivate will get the message then that Apple is not going to rewrite their pdf kit just to accomodate one recalcitrant software developer.  Unfortunately I cannot wait that long.  I have to write now.

I would strongly recommend that you try BookEnds as an alternative to EndNote X8.  It is a paid-app but it works very similarly to EndNote (that is, when EndNote used to work reliably).  I occasionally fire up EndNote X8 on my computer to see if there is a ‘patch’ update and I occasionally check responses to my postings here, but there is nothing.  I have found it necessary to move on/

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That worked for me, too, thank you soooooo much! (What worked is the suggestion to copy the whole document and paste it into a fresh new document)

Came across a very simple solution after seeing some quite complex solutions on here as to why Endnote was super dooper slow and crashing basically every time I edited a single reference on my mac having just instaled it today (and I’m running an old version of OS - Yosemite 10.10.5 and current version of Endnote X8.2).

Don’t open Endnote directly aside from when you are only doing stuff in it/first time when you need to when installing it,etc - instead make sure Endnote is closed, then go to Word and click on the Endnote tab and click on “go to Endnote” button to open it instead. Ensures only one copy of Endnote is open. If you have Endnote open and then use word Endnote tab for citations it’ll open a second copy without you realising.

Haven’t been running it for long after doing this but in the space of a few hours of frustrating repetitive freezing and either closing itself or me having to force close Endnote suddenly I can actually use it and (touch wood) no further issues so far. 

K-Jacob I tried to do what you suggested but have no PDF folder (guess as haven’t put any PDFs into Endnote). Found a much simpler solution which is that Word opens a second copy of Endnote if you happen to have Endnote open already which makes it go super slow and crash constantly -so closing all copies of Endnote and then then just using the “go to endnote” button in Word as the only way of opening it and seems to have fixed the problem completely.

And the crashing problem was alive and well with my older OS version (Yosemite).

Wow, I’ve had the same problem here and it’s a bit disconcerting to see this issue persist for longer than a year. And frustrating when this occurs during large projects with set deadlines!

Is it more stable to use the online version? Otherwise, I’m going to need to find a better solution.

Some specific pdfs seem to be more toxic and routinely cause crashes. I just tried to add the same pdf to 2 different libraries. Other pdfs were OK but one caused repeated crashes.

well said man keep up the good work

Had the same experience with Clarivate advising me that it was an apple problem with their pdf toolkit and incompatability with annotated pdf’s in OSX High Sierra.

Clarivate advised me to either role back to an earlier version of OSX or only use libraries without pdfs. Both are not really viable options, especially when using shared libraries on multi author projects. Can’t understand why Clarivate can’t simply patch Endnote to remove or prevent the pdfthumbnail rendering of pdfs when used with High Sierra which seems to be the cause of all the crashes.

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Here is my error report. I can not open the Endnote, even with updated version X8.2, which said improving the compatibility with High Sierra.  It seems the problem is related to the PDFs. I do not know how to solve it. I tried to put the documents in the totally new folder, but this does not work for me. 

Process: EndNote X8 [7832]
Path: /Applications/EndNote X8/EndNote X8.app/Contents/MacOS/EndNote X8
Identifier: com.ThomsonResearchSoft.EndNote
Version: 18.2.0.13302 (2017.18.2.0.13302)
Code Type: X86 (Native)
Parent Process: ??? [1]
Responsible: EndNote X8 [7832]
User ID: 501086115

Date/Time: 2018-06-07 09:42:17.339 -0700
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.13.5 (17F77)
Report Version: 12
Anonymous UUID: 88F396C0-80E3-295A-B349-C5F5805FC11D

Sleep/Wake UUID: BD3433B2-9F7E-45D3-9344-E3E6F3F9EE25

Time Awake Since Boot: 18000 seconds
Time Since Wake: 4400 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread: 2 Dispatch queue: PDFThumbnailRenderingController_SharedThumbnailOperationQueue (QOS: UNSPECIFIED)

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000050000020
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Termination Signal: Segmentation fault: 11
Termination Reason: Namespace SIGNAL, Code 0xb
Terminating Process: exc handler [0]

Here is my error report. I can not open the Endnote even with X8.2, which has feature of improving the compatibility with High Sierra. I tried to move the files to a new fold, but this does not work for me. It seems the error is related to the PDFS. Totally do not know how to solve this problem. 

Process: EndNote X8 [7832]
Path: /Applications/EndNote X8/EndNote X8.app/Contents/MacOS/EndNote X8
Identifier: com.ThomsonResearchSoft.EndNote
Version: 18.2.0.13302 (2017.18.2.0.13302)
Code Type: X86 (Native)
Parent Process: ??? [1]
Responsible: EndNote X8 [7832]
User ID: 501086115

Date/Time: 2018-06-07 09:42:17.339 -0700
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.13.5 (17F77)
Report Version: 12
Anonymous UUID: 88F396C0-80E3-295A-B349-C5F5805FC11D

Sleep/Wake UUID: BD3433B2-9F7E-45D3-9344-E3E6F3F9EE25

Time Awake Since Boot: 18000 seconds
Time Since Wake: 4400 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread: 2 Dispatch queue: PDFThumbnailRenderingController_SharedThumbnailOperationQueue (QOS: UNSPECIFIED)

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000050000020
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Termination Signal: Segmentation fault: 11
Termination Reason: Namespace SIGNAL, Code 0xb
Terminating Process: exc handler [0]

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I’ve had the problem of Endnote X8 crashing under 10.13 for awhile, but it was seemingly “random”. It crashed this morning, and now I cannot open Endnote at all without it crashing immediately (I don’t even see the splash page).

This is more than an inconvenience! My professional life revolves around accessing my Endnote library.

@stburrow

I am also uttelry annoyed at Clarivate for the stance they take on a MAJOR crashing bug that basically renders EndNote X8 useless on a Mac running macOS10.13.

Yes, it’s true that Apple has a PDF Kit software issue. But Clarivate could easily code a workaround. I run constantly into reproducible crashes when simply clicking a record in the database that has an attached PDF. But if this PDF is not previewed or displayed in the main window, there is no reason to necessitate EndNote to access that PDF file at that moment and thus running into the system bug. If Clarivate cannot recode that, than either they are simply unwilling, or Endnote’s code is a big mess anyway.

One cannot even get rid of PDFs because for removing an attachment you would need to be able to select a record first - and you cannot, if that action crashes the app.

It seems that only certain PDFs cause the crashes at 100% “success rate”. Not a single word from Clarivate to maybe tell us what the distinguishing properties of “offending” PDFs are. it does not have to do with contained markings, as some other posts hinted.

I might also switch back to Bookends. How to move my 2500 heavily-PDFed references? I dunno yet.

If X9 does not fix the issue, I will leave Endnote and make sure that I tell all students NOT to get this app ever. If X9 fixes the issue, I do expect a free upgrade as X8 never was a working product. (Did I hear somebody laugh? :-/ )

I exported >6000 EndNote X8 records without any problems.

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I exported >6000 EndNote entries, with pdf attachments, without any significant problems.  The trick is to break the EndNote export into blocks of 500 entries and conduct the transfer into BookEnds in a piecemeal manner.

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@stburrow

Thanks for sharing your experience.

I have now tested some XML data transfer from Endnote to Bookends myself and was very pleased. Some minor issues: a smaller pool of recognized publication types, some minor fields getting merged into the Notes fields. But all this can be handled with some smart workflow and data manipulation. PDF handling is so nice and advanced, it puts Endnote to shame.

It is funny. At first glance, one would trust a big company with providing a stable and reliable product for many years to come, and would consider a small developer to be risky. But the opposite is true in this case. Two years ago I still thought that Endnote might have an edge over Bookends, but not anymore. Especially, since Bookends now supports reference substitution with many word processing apps. Maybe Endnote rocks on Windows? I dunno. I doubt it.

This is not the time and place to list all kinds of grievances that have accumulated over the last years. I did my share and spent waaay too many hours reseaching bugs and providing workarounds, pointing (very-level-1) support to problems etc. Syncing issues, obvious code design flaws, weird user interface behavior, etc. This is time lost, unpaid, and not acknowledged. It is meanwhile clear (see version X9) that Clarivate uses Endnote as a cash cow, milking the user base as long as possible since users are afraid to switch once feeling locked in.

The journey ends here for me. The train moves on. Best wishes to all fellow, suffering users.

@jingyi

The two common crashes are these threads:

(1)

Crashed Thread: Dispatch queue: PDFThumbnailRenderingController_SharedThumbnailOperationQueue (QOS: UNSPECIFIED)
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (SIGILL)

with
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000001, 0x0000000000000000

or

Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x…

(2)

Crashed Thread:  Dispatch queue: com.apple.root.user-initiated-qos

Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x…

I have so many in my Console log, I could feed the pigs with them.

How about using a third-party clud service like Dropbox or Google Drive?