When I first saw the ‘Pages’ field I assumed it was the range of pages, e.g. 5872–5879, then I noticed the ‘Start Page’ field which I presume is ‘5872’ but then I thought ‘Pages’ might refer to the number of pages in the citation e.g.,
‘Pages’: 7
‘Start Page’: 5972
What is the purpose of the two fields?
Not precisely sure – except that some publications don’t have consecutive pages for an article. For example, newspapers might start a story on page 1, but the rest of the story is on page 5. You wouldn’t use 1-5 you would specify where the story started.
Often these days, online only publications often have a “start page” but no page range. You often view it as html, and the pagination is not as important as in the days when you asked the library to photocopy a series of pages.
Since endnote will also generate just the starting page as an option in the endnote output style, I use that field most often and rarely use starting page.