EndNote X9.3.1 running very slow on macOS Catalina

My experience too. I haven’t found a solution that holds up longer than a short session, then quitting Endnote, and restarting it: repeat. I wondered if it was my machine, but it is fully loaded (MacBook Pro 2016, 16 GB RAM, 1TB storage). 

The problem is with EndNote, as others are attesting.

PS: Don’t follow the advice of their help staff, who will make you run through endless hoops that do not avail, like relocating your library, rebuilding it, etc.

Ok…I’m at my whits end.  Been workign on my dissertation again for the past week after taking a medical break.  I don’t know what happened to Endnote in the time I was gone, but I’m about ready to throw my computer out the window.  Literally every 5 minutes while I’m typing in Word I get the beachball.  Anything I do in Endnote itself is beachball beach ball beachball.  Add a reference beachball.  Open the reference, beachball.  Add the PDF, beachball.  I swear I’ve lost at least an hour if not more of work this past week just staring at a beachball because of Endnote.  I know it’s not my machine.  What can I do to get this working or is it really time to invest in changing away?  

I’m on

macOS 10.15.2  

MacBook Pro 2017; 2.8 GHz Core i7; 16 GB Ram  

Endnote X9.3.2

Word 16.32

I’m guessing no one else is having that many issues on catalina?

I had the same problem of sluggish running of EndNote X9. I’ve clean installed X9 and updated later; but I had the problem as all in this post have experienced.

Now, I’ve resolved the problem by just clean installing EndNote X9.3.2 (latest version) at once (meaning, without updates) today, Feb. 5, 2020. All the Preferences, Connections, Styles, and Filters etc. stay as the default. Probably, the latest version may be OK with Catalina. My Mac specs are

macOS Catalina Version 10.15.3

MacBook Pro Processor 2.2 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7

EndNote X9.3.2 Bld 15235 (University Subscription)

Hope you all resolve the problems!^^

I had the same problem of sluggish running of EndNote X9. I’ve clean installed X9 and updated later; but I had the problem as all in this post have experienced.

Now, I’ve resolved the problem by just clean installing EndNote X9.3.2 (latest version) at once (meaning, without updates) today, Feb. 5, 2020. All the Preferences, Connections, Styles, and Filters etc. stay as the default. Probably, the latest version may be OK with Catalina. My Mac specs are

macOS Catalina Version 10.15.3

MacBook Pro Processor 2.2 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7

EndNote X9.3.2 Bld 15235 (University Subscription)

Hope you all resolve the problems!^^

I’ve been using Endnote for almost 25 years, and formatted up to 700 pages with thousands of references in one session. With Catalina I have encountered som kind of bug. Endnote works very slowly, even when only handling references without PDFs. When trying to update bibliography it goes extremely slowly, and with some more pages it simple tells me it times out. 
I have EN X9.3.2 and Word for Mac 16.34 on a MacBook Air 2019 with 16 GB ram. 

I have also been having this issue. Endnote X9.3.2, new MacBook pro with Catalina 10.15.3, and Word 16.34. EndNote peformance quickly degrades until it is unusable. I contacted technical support late last year about this and they said they were looking at the issue. I have emailed them 3 times this year for an update and they won’t respond to my emails. Really poor customer service by this company.

New user here,

Just paid a fortune for this software so I could export from Ovid (C/W papers)

This is just awful-Using latest version albeit with High Sierra and slow as a wet week. Occasional crashes but beachballs everywhere.

Might just have to move library to Papers.

call their tech support to see if they can isolate the problem.  

This will likely finally get me banned from here as the moderators have threatened, but I ditched EN over a year ago for Bookends and am so sorry I hadn’t done so earlier. I was plagued for 2-3 years with horribly slow performance from EndNote, regardless of the macOS version, and tech support either responded with “fixes” that were not at all useful, or even absurd ones that were so obviously not going to help (remove all PDFs-problem solved! Not). Even tried their suggestion to remove my Endnote library and files from Dropbox-that didn’t help at all.

Bookends isn’t perfect, but it was easy to migrate, the developer regularly updates it, tech support results in a prompt personal email suggestion that is always informed and usally helpful, and there are some additional features not present in EndNote. When EN 9 came out and it was clearly no better than EN 8, and had no compelling new features, I knew it was time to leave. There are other alternatives besides Bookends (which is Mac-only), including Zotero and a few others mentioned by folks in this forum over the years. Pick one that seems like it fits your needs and try out a demo, which is how I got started with Bookends. But EndNote has been tone deaf for years regarding us Mac users and shows no interest in maintaining the software for us in any reasonable shape. Good luck.

I just got EndNote from my Uni and installed it on my Mac and cannot belive how many beachballs come up with a brand new library of under 100 references (Note: most of mine do have PDFs).

I don’t have Java installed in the first place so I don’t think installing it would be helpful. Does EndNote require Java?

My compuer

EndNote X 9.3.2

MacOS Catalina 10.15.4

MacBook Pro

3.3 GHz 

16 GB ram

500GB HD (75GB free)

My endnote X9.3.1 is *also* running very slow on macOS Catalina… I only upgraded to Catalina/X9.3.1 recently and imagine my frustration when I found out that a good portion of my attachments/references were corrupted during library conversion. Now that I’m trying to fix all of that, it’s been an absurdly long process because it takes the software so long to open/move references around.

I’m having the same problem.

It seems that no solution has been provided by Clarivates for this old and very relevant problem. 

I’m working with:

EndNote X9.3.3 (institucional license)

Macbook pro 2020

2.3 GHz i7-4

macOS Catalina 10.15.6

recommend you reach out to endnote.com/support

I reported this issue to EndNote technical support Dec 2019. They said they were looking at it but now 8 months later there is no fix - perhaps it is too hard to fix. I’ve now moved to another ref manager and only wish I had done so sooner.

I have tried the following options which work but are really inconvenient 

  1. Use pages , however the default is (author, year) and there is no obvious way to change it 

  2. Disable the auto sync in preferences which does seem to speed things up but again is unsatisfactory if a) you use various machines or b) you actually want to sync to a back up.

I also find endnote does not like to start if there is no word or pages document open, so when I am just adding reference list  I need to open a word document first.

I am using a macbook air 2017 and was considering an expensive upgrade but it seems that would be a lot of money down the drain.

Annoyingly EndNote desktop is provided by my university and the director of PG studies in my department is pretty insistant we use it.

I agree…it’s CRAZY!

I have the same problem and tried everything previously mentioned in this thread.

Nothing has worked properly - the Insert Citation function is faster for a few minutes after closing and starting EndNote and Word again, but it gets slow again.
For now, I have found a very odd (can’t really explain why and how it works) way to make it work. Whenever i click “Insert Citation” and it loads for ages, I simply open a new tab on my computer via cmd+tab and instantly go back to word via the same cmd+tab - and for some weird reason the Insert Citation function has then opened. 
It’s a bit of a hassle and I don’t know if it works for anyone else but me, but I thought I’d share it with you!  At least it seems to be a preliminary fix for me. 

I have the same problem and tried everything previously mentioned in this thread.

Nothing has worked properly - the Insert Citation function is faster for a few minutes after closing and starting EndNote and Word again, but it gets slow again.
For now, I have found a very odd (can’t really explain why and how it works) way to make it work. Whenever i click “Insert Citation” and it loads for ages, I simply open a new tab on my computer via cmd+tab and instantly go back to word via the same cmd+tab - and for some weird reason the Insert Citation function has then opened. 
It’s a bit of a hassle and I don’t know if it works for anyone else but me, but I thought I’d share it with you!  At least it seems to be a preliminary fix for me. 

doesn’t work…slow as ever!!