I’m new to DT unfortunately. But I have about 2000 citations already in EndNote, and I’d like to capture more of that data to use in DT. (I have DT Pro Office 2.0.9, MacBook Pro OSX 10.6.7)
The EndNote script works well enough for books, but when you use it for any other type of reference material, the script only pulls the author name, year and number of pages, ignoring all other fields. I tried revising the script, adding the field names that EN uses for newspaper references, (and admittedly I’m about as new to script revision as to DT) but that just allowed DT to capture the data and show it in the error message but then do nothing with it.
Maybe I’ll have to tell EndNote all of my articles are books, temporarily, just for the purpose of importing data from all of the fields, but it would be great to work around that if possible.
I’ve searched and found recent forum posts about integrating DT w/ other citation software, but the only posts about Endnote seem to be outdated and/or unanswered. I’d love to hear how others have integrated or transitioned from EndNote to DT. Thank you.
yes, well, I’m new to Endnote, too. though i don’t think i’ve reached 10K, that was just the docs for one chapter. Wish I’d discovered/thought-to-explore these techniques a few years ago.
I tried pretending my newspaper article references were books, converting them to books, that is, but then I noticed that it isn’t the reference type that’s the problem – the script seems to just work for the Endnote citations that were generated from library catalogs, not those that I filled out in Endnote myself.
let’s hope somebody brilliant responds with a solution. As I mentioned, I’ve come across many unanswered questions about Endnote, and otherwise-relevant answers are about old versions.
Thanks in advance for any advice, commiseration, etc.
The problem here is that as there seem to be many very different kinds of citations with different relevant fields. So for the integration we offer one would need to settle down on a minimal set of general-purpose fields or e.g. two templates for broader use cases such as books and magazines.
(Thanks. Sorry I hadn’t checked back in a while; I thought I was receiving alerts.)
I use similar fields to those posted above, and I can’t get the script to move over any info for newspapers. I’d be happy right now (for newspapers) with the following fields:
Record #
Title
Year
Reporter
Newspaper
Issue date
Article Type
And, in a dream world, this info could be linked to the PDF in Devon (as it’s linked to the EndNote cites in EN), as well as linked to the annotate/highlight items created in Devon. Of course, if it could do all that, we might not need Endnote at all.
(speaking of which, I’m doing a trial now to Sente to see if it’s worth switching over)
P.S. another thought to the point raised about too many different fields per type of material (i.e., book, newspaper, journal, etc.):
In EndNote, no matter what reference type you are describing, each column has a generic name such as Author, Title, Year, etc. These generic names are then given specific “display” names that may or may not vary with each reference type. Users can customize the display names, too, but no matter what display header you give a field, and no matter what reference type you are describing, EndNote preserves the generic name. (And the generic fields do work for every reference type; e.g., “Author” will give you the name of whomever or whatever created the item you’re citing, so author might really be a reporter or a composer or a government department.)
I tried changing field names (a quick, easy fix) to match the names in the DT script, e.g., so that all reporters were called Authors, but that didn’t work either, maybe b/c the latest version of EndNote conflicts with that script. The new Reference Type field is a pull-down menu, behaving differently than the other fields. DT seems to recognize it as a record type, stating that it can’t use “newspaper” as a number, or something like that.
I will have a look at the latest version of Endnote and see what you mean here. I am personally not an Endnote user and I remember that it was really hard to script. Both Endnote and Bookends templates are more a hack than anything else, unfortunately. Sente is a lot better here and we are in direct contact with the makers of Sente (but don’t have a personal affiliation with Third Street Software).
Thank you for responding and for taking it under consideration. I was ready to switch to Sente, but the most recent version of EndNote can do many things Sente cannot. (besides, Endnote is free for me, and Sente is not)
If I can help at all with info about Endnote (i.e. sending you screenshots or field examples, etc.), please let me know, though I’m just getting started with both products (DevonThink Pro and Endnote).
And somehow I’m no longer getting alerts when someone responds to this thread, but i’ll try to be better about checking back more frequently.
Thank you. This (see below) is the response I got from my e-mail to EN. Let me know if there’s anything I can ask the technical team that might help, while I have him “on the line.” He’s likely to respond to me quickly, b/c the customer support people usually do. (you’d think they’d respond to you more quickly, as the president of DT, though maybe they see you as competition. i don’t know how all that works.)
Thank you very much. It seems that even though they don’t read their regular email they carefully listen to their customers! I will get back as soon as I have been in touch with them!
I have received a copy of EndNote X4 a while ago and am now testing. It seems, however, that the scripting side has not changed much.
Regarding the field names: When the script asks for a field, EndNote always uses the display name of the field. Ask for “Author” in a newspaper article and you get an empty string because here the “Author” field is suddenly named “Reporter”.
The only solution here seems to keep a sort of synonym dictionary in the script to get the author name using any of the possible field names.
Thanks so much. Of course (in the murphy’s law sense, of course, not in any ungrateful sense) i now have upgraded to EndNote X5, but I will see how this script works. And I’m also working on integrating my workflow with Scrivener 2.1, so I’m about to search for forum posts about that, too.
really appreciate your help with endnote, and i’m swamped lately but will try to get back to you with any feedback that might be helpful.
DEVONthink Pro (Office) 2.3.1.1 shipped with a new EndNote script-I believe it may be the same one Eric posted here last month. Although it is marked as EndNote X4, it is actually for EndNote X5.