Managing a literature review

I’ve asked about literature reviews before and now have some more practical questions.

A customer has an Endnote library with about 300 references that she and her team is supposed to evaluate and code for certain factors. They want to have a way to easily see that they’ve checked a given reference. What we’ve done as a first step is defined a custom field to indicate whether the article has been checked and we changed the display fields so that that custom field now appears in the library listing. We can also sort by the field and that makes it easy to see the items that have been checked.

Questions

Is there an easy way to change the contents of a given field in EndNote. Ideally it would be nice to just be able to click the reference and have the contents of the field changed. Is there even a way to quickly get to that field from the reference view? (So, once the items fields are displayed, is there a way to skip directly to that field?)

Or, instead of trying to manage this process in EndNote, is there an easy way to transfer all the references to Excel. I’ve seen earlier recommendations for moving the references using the Tab Delimited output style. We’re seeing that the references are being exported to multiple lines in Excel because of carriage returns within the records. I’ve written a quick basic program before that will translate he carriage returns to a space as appropriate, however, the program is DOS-based and won’t be very convenient.

We’d also appreciate any other ideas for how to manage the literature review.

Have a nice day

John Paul Fullerton

j-fullerton@tamu.edu

Having a way to change a field on/off from the library display window would be a nice feature I guess.  Having thought about it for awhile, in the meantime, why not assign the references to group and when a reference is checked, remove it from that group? 

Thank you for the note. That’s a good strategy–automatically assign new references to a group and delete or move from group once checked.

Another idea I had after sending my question was using a Smart Group based on the user’s custom field (when the custom field contains “yes” then display the item in the Smart Group). That could be used to automatically display either all items that had been checked or had not been checked. As your note indicates, the main issue for the user may just be identifying items that had not been checked.

Have a nice day

John Paul Fullerton

j-fullerton@tamu.edu