Endnote8 in practice

Working with EndNote 8 - practical issues

Including a special configuration for Opera browser to enable direct imports, ScienceDirect and a batch intended to make library backups easier.

Words of Warning

It appears that there are some real problems with EndNote 8. Along with current incompatibality (or lack of customization) with Opera browsers, EndNote library files are prone to corrupt. To take preventive action, create backup copies of your library files as advised in the EN help, I suggest using some automatization. In some cases, contacting EN technical support may aid to restore your corrupted library. I encountered this problem and they were kind enough recover my library, but it's better to help yourself as. They also informed me that the Mac version of EN may sometimes be able to open libraries that cause 'Generic service error' on Windows.

Keep your EndNote up-to-date

Latest EN downloads. You will need this if you use Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2).
Requires a registration, use Firefox with BugMeNot to bypass this annoyance.

ScienceDirect

For some unimaginable reason, EN8 doesn't currently work well with Elsevier's ScienceDirect citation export. You'll need to install a custom filter, made available by few institutes: http://www.adeptscience.co.uk/kb/article.php?noteid=CA86 and mirrorred here http://www.library.mmu.ac.uk/endnote_filters/refman_ris_for_mmu.enf

Exporting references from the Opera browser

Requires some extra tuning currently (versions 8.5 and before).
Preferences -> Files types -> New...
Add MIME type
application/x-inst-for-scientific-info,
extension *
Choose Open with another application
and find your EN,e.g.
C:\Program Files\EndNote 8\EndNote.exe.
That's it, click OK and OK again and it should work as well as with other browsers.

If you use ScienceDirect you'll also need to add this:
application/x-Research-Info-Systems,
extension *
and Choose Open with another application
and find your EN, e.g.
C:\Program Files\EndNote 8\EndNote.exe.
Click OK and OK again to finish the dialogs.

If that sounded too complex, edit your opera6.ini file directly and insert these two definitions

application/x-inst-for-scientific-info=3,C:\Program Files\EndNote 8\EndNote.exe,,,*,|

application/x-Research-Info-Systems=3,C:\Program Files\EndNote 8\EndNote.exe,,,*,|...=0,,,,,|

Depending on your Opera installation, you will find it in Opera main program folder or in your personal folder, e.g. in C:\Documents and Settings\John Smith\Application Data\Opera\Opera8.5\profile\opera6.ini.

Creating library backups

As long as the aforementioned bug persists, Windows users may benefit from the following DOS batch. If you're unfamiliar with batchs, they are like small programs that execute set of commands you normally run in the command shell (DOS prompt), but can also be run by just double clicking the file name. First you can create a new text file (.txt) to which copy-paste the code below. After this, you can rename the file, e.g. My_ENL_Backup.bat the extension bat is compulsory. Make the changes to places beginning SET below to mark your designated locations. You may need to rearrange the settings regarding the date format, this has been tested with finnish regional settings only.

@echo off

REM EndNote library backup script for daily backups using DOS zip archiving
REM by Lassi A. Liikkanen
REM created 2005/02/24
REM modified 2006/06/08
REM tested with Windows XP Pro (extended commands)
REM substring solution from http://www.computing.net/programming/wwwboard/forum/11261.html
REM the other good resource http://www.cs.ntu.edu.au/homepages/bea/home/subjects/ith305/description.html
REM date formatting http://www.robvanderwoude.com/datetiment.html

REM set BD=%DATE:~3% 	REM OLD WAY


REM GET THE DATE TOKENS, THIS PART IS SPECIFIC TO YOUR REGIONAL SETTINGS

FOR /F 'TOKENS=1-4* DELIMS=. ' %%A IN ('DATE/T') DO (
	SET Year=%%D
	SET Month=%%C
	SET Day=%%B
	)

SET BD=%Year%%Month%%Day%

set MYBACKUPDIR=C:\EndNote_backups

set MYENLDIR=D:\MyDocs\LiteratureReferences
set MYENLFILE=AllDearReferences

IF NOT EXIST %MYBACKUPDIR% mkdir %MYBACKUPDIR%
IF NOT EXIST %MYBACKUPDIR%\%BD% mkdir %MYBACKUPDIR%\%BD%

xcopy /Y %MYENLDIR%\%MYENLFILE%.enl %MYBACKUPDIR%\%BD%\
xcopy /S /Y %MYENLDIR%\%MYENLFILE%.data %MYBACKUPDIR%\%BD%\


echo REMEMBER
echo to delete the backup files when you don't need them,
echo as they take extra space from your hard disk.

To make things even easier, you can automate this with Window's Scheduled tasks in the Control panel. I suggest you add this as a task that is executed everytime you log in. Note that the files are not automatically removed so you should clean up the files once in a while (universal removal would be tricky with built-in Windows command prompt tools, as the used date will vary from system to system along with country settings).

Other issues

I encountered another strange thing lately. When opening a Word document (.doc) that contained EndNote formatted references, I always got a small dialog box with an exclamation mark saying 'The object has been deleted', titled 'EndNote8'. However, I was able to work this out with EN customer support (they were again very helpful and responsive) by doing the following:

Open the reference database used by the document (.enl library)
Unformat citations in the Word document, selectTools ->EndNote ->Unformat citation(s)
Select all of the text and unlink fields (removes field codes), press Ctrl+6
Format the bibliography again, selectTools ->EndNote ->Format bibliography...

I lost no data in the operation, but is of course recommended to always back up your document before experiments of any kind.

Name*:	Email*:
Your email will not be shown publicly or disclosed to third parties, it is used to validate messages Location (City, Country):
Your comment here
* This information must be provided