Five Recommendations to Save Endnote 20 for Mac’s GUI
I agree that the the new interface for EndNote 20 for Mac leaves much to be desired in both its form and function. I have some specific recommendations/requests for anyone at EndNote who may be watching/listening. Each recommendation corresponds to an arrow in the attached annotated image of the EN20 interface.
- The Groups Panel (pink arrow)
- The first problem with groups is that there is currently no way to access recently viewed/exported citations. Potential solutions might include:
- A smart group that keeps a running list of the 50± most recently viewed citations (like the “Recently Added” group), OR…
- New reference fields that automatically populate the date and time a citation was last viewed, edited, and/or exported (then they can be manually sorted or added to a custom smart-group).
- The second issue with the groups panel is the lack of options for sorting and filtering (e.g., sort by recent views, filter by year and group/group-set) or viewing (e.g., hide the empty “GROUPS SHARED BY OTHERS” group if not in use).
- Functionality for sorting and filtering groups, at least, would be great.
- The References Panel (orange arrow)
- The primary problem is the small display area which prevents visualization of the full title in about one third of all references (without srolling or adjusting the panel dimensions).
- One option to solve this issue could be to wrap text in the display fields.
- Options for vertical and horizontal screen splitting would help as well!
- The Reference Details Panel (yellow arrow)
- The space indicated by “a” is completely useless.
- The simple solution is to stack each field’s title (e.g., “Author,” “Year,” “Place Published”) above the entry field instead of next to it (see “b”).
- Options for vertical and horizontal screen splitting would help as well!
- The Summary/Edit Buttons (blue arrow)
- The problem with the summary panel is that it lacks utility. The Summary panel’s only addition to the overall EN20 interface is the citation view, which–ironically–is automatically minimized on opening. This creates problems in the editing workflow as users must navigate back and forth between Edit and Summary to see how changes affect citation output.
- One option to solve this issue would be, as in EN9, to split that space between a stacked panel of editable reference fields and a panel with the formatted citation output.
- The missing PDF preview (white arrow)
- This is the biggest problem with EN20. The PDF preview is a critical component of citation management software. The solution: Just put it back in there!
