Endnote Will Make You Fall in Love With PDFs All Over Again!

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Writing a research paper often generates more electronic files than most authors bargain for – especially in the form of full-text article PDFs! Endnote (desktop version) has many features that can now help you get the most out of your PDFs and keep them in one tidy, well-organized, and fully-portable place.

Here are just some of things you can do with PDFs in Endnote X7:

  • The “Find Full-Text” feature effortlessly harvests available full-text article PDFs and actually stores them as object (or “attachments”) in the corresponding Endnote record.
  • If you have article PDFs already downloaded living in a folder on your computer but have not yet brought in the corresponding citation information from a bibliographic database, try importing the PDF by going to File>Import> File… and selecting “PDF” as your import file. If the article PDF is less than 10 years old or so, there is a good chance that the publisher has already embedded citation information on the PDF that Endnote will extract from and create a citation record.
  • Your Endnote PDF attachments can also be edited and saved. For example, sections of the article PDF text can be highlighted and annotated with your personal notes…so that you can remember those important sections that you planned on discussing in your manuscript!
  • Once annotated – you can use Endnote “Search Library” function to search on any field in the Endnote record – including “Any Field + PDF with Notes”. In other words, this search will allow you to search beyond the typical information available in an Endnote citation. It will allow you to mine the full-text of your PDFs and the annotations/notes you have added! (Please note, however, that only more recent PDFs whose text is machine-readable will be searchable. You will not be able to search on the full-text of those PDFs scanned as images that have not undergone optical character recognition (OCR) conversion.)
  • To make your PDF-loaded Endnote library more portable, compressed versions of your Endnote libraries can be saved with or without the PDF attachments – you decide! If you need to email a file that is getting too big – simply exclude the PDF attachments.

To learn more about the great features mentioned above – be sure to attend one of the MSK Library’s upcoming Endnote workshops.