Managing References Using EndNote (1)

When we are dealing with academic writing or any writing with reliability need, we have to enclose all references we use. For a short essay, managing reference may be handy, but for lengthy article with hundreds of reference, it is helpful to have specific software to ease our task.

EndNote is powerful software for reference management. There are some others software such as Zotero and Biblioscape, but I have been using EndNote since my undergraduate study, so I am more familiar with it. You can check other reference management software here.

Now I will assume that some of you do not know EndNote before, thus I will start with the program and user interface. EndNote is developed by Thomson Reuters, and is not free software. It costs around US$ 300. However, institution can have a license for multiple users, for example university can share the license for its students. Find EndNote here.

After installing EndNote, every time we want to use it, we will be asked to create a ‘library’ first. This is the file for reference storage, in format of .enl (EndNote Library). Name your library first, and then we will get this display. Here I am using EndNote X3. The latest version of EndNote is EndNote X4.

You can insert reference into EndNote manually, or importing from another EndNote library, or export the reference directly from a website. Firstly I will explain about manually creating reference list.

From the display above, choose ‘References’ tab and then ‘New Reference’, or simply click the ‘green plus’ sign. You will be brought to this interface:

The default reference type is ‘journal article’, but you can choose other types via the drop down menu.