EndNote X9 extremely slow on MacOS 10.13

Best of luck to you. 

@psobotka wrote:

Thank you for the advice. I consider it. So far I can see that X9 still keeps crashing on MacOS High Sierra 10.13.6. What will happen on Mojave 10.14, we’ll see. The major feature of X9 is a new icon. Ludicrous! Clarivate Analytics sells the new version of EndNote but they don’t improve/fix anything, especially for Mac OS users. Basically, EndNote with its version by version became an expensive subscription service with lousy performance. The upgrade is a waste of money! Still waiting for an answer from Technical Support.

The answer of Technical Support is very interesting: EndNote and iCloud does not like each other. Helpful could be turning off iCloud synchronization in the location where EndNote library is. Surprisingly revealing and truly helpful.

Best regards!

I took that advice and pulled it from my Dropbox-synced folder. It made zero difference. None at all. But again, best of luck to you. I have never found any advice from their tech support to be useful. YMMV.

I have to +1 on this. It is still slow on macOS Mojave.

I don’t know if this is related to 32/64 bit. Hoping for a long-awaited 64 bit version…

Endnote is not only slow on High Sierra, it is slow on any platform including Mojave. If you are in the beginning of an article do not hesitate to switch to bookends (especially if you are on MacOS). But if, like me, you are in the middle of your thesis and have no other options than continue to use endnote (which socks) then pray that the developers start all over again with a new version because it has become an Gaz factory which has inherited from all other previous versions bugs and slowness. 

Flav

I can confirm that EndNote X9 is still painfully slow on macOS 10.14.1. I filed a bug report. Perhaps it will help if more people do this:

https://support.clarivate.com/Endnote/s/Product-or-technical-question?language=en_US

They need to get this under control quickly. 

This has been a problem dating back to X8 and despite a lot of emails with tech support and a ton of posts from many of us on this forum, we have been met with either ineffective instructions or, more disturbingly, silence. I finally gave up and like the previous post, went to Bookends and haven’t looked back. Just sorry I hadn’t done that sooner by a year or so. It isn’t cloud syncing. It isn’t solved by creating a new library. Hell, it wasn’t even solved with their new pricey upgrade (I tried their trial and it has the same bugs as X8 and isn’t yet 64-bit).

Removing the library from iCloud solved for me the problem and I am using Mojave. They should make this more public!

+1 on this whole debacle. Will switch soon if they don’t fix it.

I agree, I should have read this trail, before I bought EN, it is pretty much a flop (OS 10.14.4)

It is so slow that it is of no use at all.

Are there alternatives that work on a Mac?

1 Like

I agree, I should have read this trail, before I bought EN, it is pretty much a flop (OS 10.14.4)

It is so slow that it is of no use at all.

Are there alternatives that work on a Mac?

1 Like

Yes there are. I can’t mention them without getting kicked out of this forum, sadly, but an online search will help you. Find what works best for your individual needs. I did…

thanks

Hello,

I had very slow speed with Endnote on my Mac. In fact, in my case, the problems comes from the synchronization with iCloud. I juste addes “.nosync” to the name of my file and everything was back to normal.

Hope it’ll help other.

Regards.

DrAldol

Hello,

I had very slow speed with Endnote on my Mac. In fact, in my case, the problems comes from the synchronization with iCloud. I juste addes “.nosync” to the name of my file and everything was back to normal.

Hope it’ll help other.

Regards.

DrAldol

I am in the process of ordering licences of EndNote for my research group. 

I just installed a trial version of EndNote X9 on my MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018) with 2.9 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i9, and contains 16 GB 2400 MHz DDR4.

EndNote is already crashing and showing signs that will be super slow.

I’m in the process of ordering several licences of EndNote for my research group.

I just installed a trial version of EndNote X9 on my MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018), which has 2.9 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i9 and a memory of 16 GB 2400 MHz DDR4.

EndNote is already slow and crashing, thus not giving a good first impression.

Yes, unfortunately EndNote for the past two major version upgrades seems mostly to have been abandoned as far as performance issues are concerned. They make a couple of aesthetic changes, slap a new version number on it, and try to charge folks a hefty pricetag for it. What is worse, some people who have purchased EN 20 have said they’ve actualy begun taking away certain capabilities!

X7 was the last version that really worked well for me and if I could just dust it off and make it work for Big Sur and the current version of Word, I would. Since then, versions have given me beachballs, freezing, sluggishness, etc. A real mess that I am positive could easily be reproduced on the machines used to beta-test by the developers. It honestly seems they literally just can’t be bothered anymore.

Unfortunately, this is not a trajectory that is specific to EndNote, whose intellectual property rights/brand has changed hand from one large company to another at least a few times in the past decade. There’s a tendency to milk good products of every last drop of revenue while maintaining skeletal support and occasionally releasing nominally “new” releases to project the image that the product isn’t Abandonware.

I’m not holding out much hope for a major turn-about anytime in the near future, and that’s just sad.

Check out Bookends. Or any of a number of options that have more features than EN and are actually maintained and improved. I gave up bc endnote’s developers are getting either indifferent or have no clue how to actually work with us users towards a solution. I abandoned ship and am dumbfounded I hadn’t done it sooner as I should have. 

Thanks, I’ll certainly be giving that product and some other alternatives careful consideration. For the time being, I’m sticking with EN, though if things continue the way they have been for the past several years, that won’t be the case for much longer. One has only so much patience, after all.