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Endnote (die die die)
I'm generally liking both the price and the performance of Mavericks on my relatively new-ish Mac, although there are some compatibility issues here and there, including with some of my most used software like MailTags, and although it won't work on my old but still serviceable and well-loved first-generation Intel Mac.
But one incompatibility is really upsetting me, especially as I have deadlines to meet - EndNote X5. Thomson Reuters have no intention of fixing this and suggest upgrading to X7, which will get an update 'in the next few weeks'. I have been irritated by EndNote too many times over the past few years, with perfectly servicable versions failing each time a new version of Word (another hateful piece of software) comes out and requiring costly updates, despite adding absolutely no new functionality of any value at all for over 10 years. Not to mention Thomson's evil and cynical attack on the open-source Zotero. But this is ridiculous. X5 came out in late 2011, I bought it in 2012, and there have been two pointless and expensive updates since then, neither of which is anything more than a minor point-release. I reluctantly paid for a copy of X5 because, despite not wanting to use it and having perfectly decent free and open alternatives like Zotero and the pre-acquisition version of Mendeley, I work with people that do use it and it makes life easier to share the same reference manager. Now I give up. It has long been the case that EndNote is bloated, buggy and overpriced. Thomson Reuters are able to get away with it because of lock-in and path dependencies. When it was one of only a handful of options it was about as good as it got, so lots of people used it and it spread like a disease for compatibility reasons. I don't care how difficult it makes it to work with collaborators around the world, or the effort involved in learning new quirks of new reference managers, I will no longer support Thomson's greed. Their lack of interest in their locked-in customers as anything other than cash cows is more appalling than their ugly software. On the bright side, it will hopefully reduce my dependency on MS-Word (same collaboration issues) too.
I'm defaulting to Zotero but, if anyone has any alternative suggestions (I don't mind paying if it is worth the money), do pass them on!
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Jon Dron
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Hi Jon: have you tried Bookends? http://www.sonnysoftware.com
They've done a great job of pushing out regular updates.
I own a copy, but I have to admit that I'm not a religious user of biblio software--I'm still a cutter-and-paster at heart!
Although I don't use endnote or other reference manager, I certainly agree with the sentiment "down with upgrade extortion". I'm living with many 'out-of' versions of software (vmware, word, ...) simply because I refuse to pay for updates that aren't.
I might also add in the spirit of the title... "down with docx (die die die)".
Thanks for posting this Jon.
I currently use X6 and am wanting to upgrade to Mavericks...I may reconsider until I know more about options like x6 compatibility or the process of moving to Zotero.
Endnote works very nicely with Pages, I find, but faculty insistence on composing my thesis in Word may drive me to drink far more than I should. EN is embarassingly clunky in Word...which is clunky enough on its own.
Cheers,
Colin
@Colin - looks like X6 may have some problems from the 'support' site (most support is along the lines of 'upgrade to the latset version'). They haven't even got round to fixing X7 yet, so I'd not want to trust it. I had to give up on Endnote in Pages because, though the integration is good, the Pages version does not recognized embedded codes from Word, so it's not useful for collaboration which is the only reason I use Word and Endnote in the first place.
I'm liking the look of @Derek's Bookends suggestion, thanks Derek. Seems to work with a lot of things and has some very nice features, including working with Pages and seamlessly sucking in EndNote references. At least, that what it suggests on the box - need to test this!
I'd prefer to go with open source. I have not found Zotero to be very friendly in the past but I *think* it's the best of the bunch. I like but am not sure that I have the time to play with something like BibDesk, which is a very powerful alternative but really needs the whole Bibtex ecosystem that I have always found daunting. I've given up on Mendeley, though it's not bad in functional terms. However, it was never truly open, Elsevier got it and I don't like to trust the cloud at the best of times - makes upgrade extortion of the sort @Richard mentions seem like a minor misdemeanour when you suddenly find your data owned by someone else you don't like, or just lost, or the service changes to do something awful (Hotmail, I'm looking at you - guilty on all three charges).
Well, I went ahead and purchased Bookends after some preliminary checking using the limited version showed me it worked.
It picks up all of EndNote's references as long as they are unformatted (which can still be handled via Word even though EndNote itself doesn't work and more) and, better still, it works well with Scrivener, LibreOffice and Pages, albeit not all at the same time. The Scrivener option is particularly appealing because, right now, the main reason I don't use it for almost everything is its limited referencing support. I'm really looking forward to putting my next book back into Scrivener so that I can organize my writing properly again. I *really* like Bookends's tools for extracting references from existing documents *and* from many different web sources, including Scholar. Far more fluid, flexible, rich in options and much more straightforward than EndNote. Massively rich and complex set of prefs and menu options that will take me a while to figure out, but it's working straight out of the box on imported EndNote refs, having preserved all the unique IDs and content. In fact, rather more than in EndNote itself - an annoying oddity is that it pulls in the hidden fields from EndNote so that, when I'm using refs that a collaborator originally added, it refers back to their originals of the documents on their own hard drives - easily fixed, but a hassle. Also, I'm guessing it might not handle EndNote travelling libraries very well, but it has enough tools to work around that and worst case scenario I still have EndNote 9 on an elderly Mac that should handle that. Apart from that, all seems a vast improvement on EndNote - much better and much much cheaper. Thanks Derek!
I like that you report that bookends works well with Scrivener. I too have been frustrated that Scrivener wouldn't play nicely with Endnote.
I spent a few hours last weekend figuring out how best to move my EN library into the standalone Zotero app and finally got it to work ok. All the instructions seemed to indicate that EN had to be exported in RIS format, which worked fine, but Zotero wouldn't import more than about 50 references at a time. I finally exported as BibTex which Zotero imported beautifully.
After that was the hassle of going through my thesis and manually inserting Zotero refs to replace the EN refs, as it didn't appear that Zotero would pick up on the EN codes...that was tedious, but I found a few improper references in the process, so not a total loss.
I haven't tried Zotero in Scrivener.
I may try Bookends as it seems the transition is a little smoother, and I need to get my wife moved from EN.
Having done the export process a few times over the years, I've wound up with a lot of duplicates in Zotero thanks to multiple imports - not too tricky to delete the excess but more hassle than I need.
I've not yet completely removed EndNote due to the need to unformat citations before they become usable in Bookends, but much looking forward to killing it permanently. The only real, if minor, irritation so far is the lack of a keyboard shortcut for inserting citations - I prefer not to use a mouse. I'm pretty sure there's a way to get around this but it will probably involve a bit of Automator hacking.
I can't seem to get the keyboard shortcuts to work in Zotero either...
I've found this - http://veritrope.com/tech/the-basics-using-keyboard-shortcuts-with-applescripts/ - which seems promising. Not tried it yet but the option to add context-sensitive keyboard shortcuts looks like it should be an answer.