Review: EndNote Web

Institutions subscribing to ISI Web of Knowledge received notice on Monday from Thomson Scientific that our users now have access to EndNote Web, a web-based version of the citation management software. I’ve never used EndNote and was curious how I, as a novice user, would find the experience. Is having “free” web-based access enough to make me want to use citation software? Is it enough for me to encourage undergraduates to use citation software?

Setting Up

The first step is to register, just as you would to use other customized features of the database. The first difficulty I encountered was that the password has to be 8 characters and contain a number and a special character. My throw-away internet password doesn’t meet those criteria so I had to invent a specific password just for this purpose. I guess I can rest easy knowing no one is going to steal my three citations about research management software while I sleep tonight.

I scanned the terms of agreement. I didn’t see anything scary like they own everything that I put into EndNote Web.

When I logged in the first time, I was given the option to download toolbars for Firefox and Internet Explorer and a plug-in for Microsoft Word. I did all of that, taking the advice in the sidebar to download the IE toolbar using IE. The toolbar provides a link to my EndNote Web folders—unfortunately, they call this button “My Library.” Could they think of a more confusing term to use when it’s mostly libraries that will be providing this service? There is also a “Capture” button to load the citations into EndNote Web.

Tours and Tutorials

The Guided Tour within EndNote was dry and uninspiring. The online tutorials, screencasts with sound, were worth the effort--particularly since they were short and I could pick and choose which ones to watch.

Capture

The Capture button on the tool bar is what should make the citation collection process easy. In the tutorial, it shows that you can be looking at a citation in PubMed, click on Capture and all the citation information loads into the appropriate fields of the pop-up window—much like Illiad works when requesting an article through interlibrary loan from a database.

Unfortunately, that lovely picture is not the reality for every database that we have. EndNote Web was unable to fill any fields for citations from the Wilson Web database, Library Literature and Information Science. It did slightly better with the EBSCO’s Library, Information Science, and Technology Abstracts—but it messed up many fields and I found it really annoying to attempt to edit the tiny boxes to get the citation correct.

The citation handling from FirstSearch was a big improvement over both Wilson Web and EBSCO. I didn’t have to correct anything that went into the citation. I chose to add a few things, but the item I found was an article from a Proceedings book, so I wouldn’t necessarily expect software to capture it perfectly.

Oddly enough, the Capture button couldn’t retrieve any information from the Web of Science or INSPEC databases that we get from ISI! That’s when I noticed a button in the right sidebar that said “Save in my EndNote Web.” That, as expected, saved a perfect citation. There’s also a link that takes me right back to the citation in Web of Knowledge—wish they could do that for every database.

Successes and Failures

Folder names are restricted to 17 characters. Who does that anymore?

The Shared Folder concept works well, although the interface was a bit clunky. It took more than one try for me to share my “Research Mgt” file with my boss. But when it worked, he could see the citations I had collected on the topic of Research Management software.

The Online Search which allows simple searching from within the EndNote Web interface didn’t work at all in our environment. I was prompted for usernames and passwords even for databases that I know we have. And the search of our library catalog said that it found 7 books but then got an error message when it attempted to retrieve the list. Since the search interface is so simplistic, I would feel just fine telling our students to use the native interfaces or our multisearch instead of this feature. I was told that the search feature in the installed version of EndNote has the same problems in our environment.

Conclusion

EndNote Web will be most useful to people who need to handle a lot of citation data and do it from both a home computer and a work computer. These researchers will be able to download a toolbar on the computers they use most often and access the same data from either location.

It will be less useful to people, including students, who frequently work at publicly-accessible computers. Downloading a toolbar will be inconvenient or impossible on those computers, diminishing the utility of the software. However, the citation data will be available for access on the Web and can be edited manually in situations where the Capture button would ordinarily be the best method. Since the Capture button is an imperfect tool, this may be no great loss.

As I noted yesterday, citation management software doesn’t really solve the problems I’m working on, but I’m convinced that there are people who need it and will appreciate the added access to their data they will get from a web-based solution.

Labels: reviews

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