Endnote asked me to post my questions here, but it took a while because last year I was disabled. Most of us go in and out of states of disability throughout our lives. In my case I had a bad fall and crushed my right wrist in five places, requiring surgery - and then another one to compensate for the first.
Endnote is a brilliant product. I could care less about how it looks, but I keep discovering new features. I wouldn’t know how to work without it.
But right now my feeling is that I should not have upgraded to Endnote 8 - it has caused so many problems. Many of the new features I cared about in Endnote 8 did not accomplish its intended objective.
I really need features that protect me spiraling injuries. Every mouse click felt like I was being stabbed with a knife. At night, I needed to sit for hours with my wrists on ice packs.
Using Endnote requires a lot of grip strength, and gripping is by far the most painful action in Endnote. It requires a lot of force with small (intrinsic) muscle groups. And most of this gripping could have been entirely avoided!
I have a 36 inch wide monitor, but even with Endnote maximized I need to constantly grasp the bar that move it back and forth so I can see the cites in the main body. This has been unbelievably painful - and there are so many workarounds for preventing these problems. For example, look at the way you can move the Adobe Acrobat bookmark vertical bar with 2 or three clicks << <<< <<<
Next question, Why the *ll do I have to put up with features I don’t use? I never use the preview tab in the right side cites window, so why on earth can’t I click it off? Then I wouldn’t have
Next question. Why the *.* does the database slow to a crawl, so I end up fighting it all the time? I have done so much to try to compact, recover, copy files, but even so I get bogged down. When Endnote hogs the memory, it’s extremely difficult to move the vertical bar. And I have a super fast quad-raided PC with 64 Gb RAM.
Even so, I end up struggling to move the bar… and sometimes it just won’t. When memory is overloaded, it just won’t work. And Endnotes slower performance means that I have much more of these struggles.
Next question. Why the *.* do you give us so few options in the references tab? And not take advantage of wasted real estate to let us do things like (for example) change the caps without having to keep clicking to go in and out of the maxed citation? Just more stabbing me in the wrist.
I begged Endnote to find a way to automatically replace or update citations. They did put that feature in this version, but exacted a great physical cost.
1. I’m guessing that that is the reason that we lost the ability to selectively replace fields. I may not want to replace everything, so replacing parts requires me to type or handwrite notes about things to add later on when I can actually edit the cite.
2 At other times, it is absolutely miserable trying to get to the point where it goes into the automatic mode for updating files. Jeez, why on earth isn’t there a radio button so I can tell Endnote to just update empty fields? I may need to go through fifty citations or more before Endnote actually gives me the option to update empty fields from then on. WAY more clicking.
3. I am entirely unable to take advantage of the “automatically replace” all citation fields because - and I don’t know if this is Endnote or Pubmed or what but it’s continually switching the years - say replacing the year 1995 to 2016.
The vast majority of switched years are 2016. Probably 95% of the switched years. But here and there Endnote switches other years.
I’ve asked NLM about this problem and they say it’s not coming from them. Though I can well believe they may be wrong. Or maybe it’s coming through the journal export side. But it’s not uncommon for me to find that half of the years for my downloaded cites are wrong - generally listed incorrectly as 2016.
Next question. Why do I have to put up with the “configure sync” on the library menu when I never use it? Why can’t I click “do not show”?
Please keep in mind that when people have (temporary or permanent) disabilities, that our movements are awkward, haphazard and strained. And further that Endnote 8 often freezes and whites out, causing me to click on the wrong thing… and when you are injured, it’s frightening to have to deal with this thing popping up all the time. For no acceptable reason.
Next question. Why can’t we edit our top menu to display the icons we would use? This is a common practice. I hate to have to enter a cite when I don’t need to.
Next question. Just basic UIX / usability. When I tried to remove the asterisks from the Endnote “Find and replace” on the Edit menu, I asked it to search and replace all the asterisks in the titles, which are unnecessary. In one swipe, instead it just deleted all of the titles in my database. Don’t you have usability people to tell you that you need to warn people before you destroy their database?
Next question. Why doesn’t Endnote help us more with finding duplicates?
- For example, why can’t we search for duplicates by DOI?
- Why does Endnote not realize that each of these kinds of dashes are equivalent (below)
–
–
—
—
–
Duplicates are a whole other issue, there are SOOOO many things Endnote could do make it easier to identify duplicate issues.
Sorry for sounding like this. You all have a brilliant product, I just think there are major screwups that have caused me a great deal of physical pain and wasted time.