DT and Endnote: can they talk?

DEVONthink Feedback
1

I ran a search on "Endnote" and found no references in the forum, so here goes: I have over 2,500 book abstracts in Endnote and nearly 2,000 in DT and am wondering how I will get the two to talk to each other.

That is, how may I export EN entries to DT (for fast searching, indexing, etc) but also export DT entries to EN (for formatted footnotes or bibliography?) Is copy and paste the only answer?

At the moment, DT is a great place to park data, organize it, and search it when needed. But it does not produce formatted output in professional style; for that you need a bibliography program like Endnote or Bookends.

If we could customize the Info dialog so that it contained fields such as Author, Year, Title, etc, then DT could produce such output and there’d be less need for a bibliography program. Or if we had an EN plug-in for DT, we could type or paste the info into an EN entry, as is now possible from Word or Appleworks.

Perhaps this could be added to a future version. Or is there an easy way to pass data back and forth? (The new Endnote 7 will scan RFT files, and if they contain the "shorthand" citations produced by EN, EN will create footnotes and bibliography.)

I’d be interested to know what others think about these issues.

2

A preliminary answer to my question:

I created a Style in Endnote called "Annotated" which has MLA style for Author, Title, etc, followed by the abstract of contents.

Then I exported 10 entries. You may save in Text, RTF, HTML, or XML. I used RTF.

Open the file with TextEdit or DT.

Select, drag, and drop each text chunk to the DT outline window, and you have 10 items, each named for its first line of text.

Result looks like this:

Diamond, Jared M. “The Science of History: What We Don’t Know, Why We Don’t Know It.” Washington Post, February  7, 1999, 03.
     Defends use of science and technology to explain historical gaps, such as the origins, migrations and fates of peoples. “The application of science to mysteries such as these shows just how much historians can profit, not just from using scientific technology, but also from adopting elements of the scientific method itself.” Examines Austronesian expansion, the objections to pursuing history scientifically, the use of natural experiments, the differences between Euro and Chinese geography that shape its history. Study these, and we come to know the diffs between success and failure. (Extends the thesis of Guns, Germs, Steel).

Bottom line: you may pass data from EN to DT. It would be cool if that worked by drag and drop between the apps (doing that only copies the “shorthand” code from EN), instead of via the Export routine. I guess that’s because d-and-d does not create the RFT filtering.

DT does not produce the formatted output styles that are the mainstay of EN, along with downloading entries from online databases.

For the moment, I will use DT to gather all my raw data. If I want a formatted citation for a source, I’ll download it to EN. I have to use it anyway while writing with Word, and I know it won’t be fun to have to work back and forth between 3 apps and their windows (DT, EN, Word). Maybe down the line this will all become more integrated.

3

Yes, it seems exporting the Endnote library then importing to DT is the best way.

These issues relating to Endnote have been raised here more than once - I forget exactly where.

Since DT does not (yet) support the creation of specific fields for data entry (and after all, its attraction lies precisely in providing an alternative that avoids the drudgery of data entry), one option is simply to copy formatted citations into the Comments field of the Info palette. Then you can at least do searches for authors or titles using the Comments search option.

In short, I don’t know of a streamlined solution. I would much prefer to forget Endnote and work entirely in DT. But one can’t expect DT to be a specialised bibliography application, since that was never its purpose.

4

I agree that it would be a bit lofty to expect DT to handle citations like EndNotes, but I’ve previously expressed a need to somehow integrate bibliographic data into certain files, namely PDFs, so that I can easily figure out where the heck I got them from when citing them. Since DT is a powerhouse for researchers – whether or not they constitute a significant number of users – then it should logically follow that integrating bibliographic data into DT should be vital to its growth. Even if the provision is made in future versions of DT for metadata fields (Acrobat has an anemic function called “Document Metadata”), then exporting that data into formatted bibliographies should be simple.

5

I wonder if Applescript could be used to translate DT content to EndNote fields.  Is EndNode scriptable?  If so, then you might be able to create a Finder folder action script, similar to the ‘Action Import.scpt’ script that comes with DT.  But instead of simple import into DT, it could parse a formatted DT data item.

author: <auth>
title: <title>

or whatever biblio format is convenient.  The script could then import the item into EndNote when the item is exported from DT to the Finder action folder.

Clearly if this works in one direction it could be done with a similar script in the other direction, from EndNote to DT.

6

On second thoughts, the issue of DT and Endnote had been discussed before this thread started (the search variable "Max Age since last post" perhaps left unchanged?) and a very interesting suggestion was made by the Administrator:

" We’ll add the possibility to import/edit structured data (like CSV, tab text, maybe bibtex) to the Standard Edition. Then you’ll be able to view this data either as a table or as a form and therefore it’s possible to create some kind of “sub databases” (like address or bibliographic databases) inside DEVONthink."

If BibTeX would be supported, not just for import but also for new texts so that new data could be structured in that format, this would be great news, not only for Endnote users (I assume, because Endnote aseems to support this format, too, just as Bookends) but for many others as well since BibTeX is a very, if not the most common bibliography format around.