I couldn’t agree more. The absence of this function from Endnote was what caused me to stick with Ref Man for so long. I am surprised that it’s not been requested more frequently, because it relieves the need to remember exactly what’s in your database.
For example, say I want to locate a paper that I am pretty sure (but not 100% certain) is in my database, by an author whose name I recall somewhat vaguely. I have to guess at how it’s spelled. Darn, is it Nillsen? Or Nilsen? Maybe Nillson?
_ In Ref Man _
I type N (a drop-down list appears, of existing authors whose surname begins with N)
I type I (the list of names reduces, to display only Ni…)
I type L (the list is further reduced, and now, hopefully, I see one of the above 3 possibilities). AHA, it’s Nillson.
OR, perhaps I type the L, and only 1 author is returned - Nilson - a spelling that I hadn’t even considered but, yup, that’s the one I want. Thanks for jogging my failing memory, Ref Man !
OR if, after I type “L”, the list is empty…I immediately know that the database doesn’t have any authors whose name begins with Nil
_ In EndNote _
I type “Nillsen” and click search - no result.
I type “Nilsen” and click search - no result.
I type “Nillson” and click search - YAY.
But if Nillson, too, returns no result, then I’m stuck. Endnote won’t show me “Nilson”.
I know that I could search using Author / Word begins with & enter Nil - click search button. But this can return a bunch of papers in which the relevant author’s name is not displayed in the search results because, for example, they’re 10th author on a multi-author paper (and because of space limitations, the results list displays only the first 2 or 3 authors).
And the above is just for author searches. It’s even worse when searching for keywords, because the user has to remember how the keyword was previously entered. For example, did I enter it TLR4 or TLR-4? Again, Ref Man made it easy. Type TLR and you’d see how you had entered it (and if you’d done it differently for different papers, you’d see both forms displayed).
Please, consider facilitating searches by adding a drop-down box of “suggestions”, at least for authors and keywords.