PAPERS AND ENDNOTE X2

Writing and publishing is part and parcel of a life as an academician. Thinking and doing a research is already a major hurdle. However writing and publishing is a bigger hurdle to climb compared to doing a research. The most difficult part in writing is organizing your references and also citing your references in your paper or article. This is where this 2 programmes for Macintosh gives you a great help. Here I want to introduce Papers for Mac and Endnote X2 for Mac (Endnote is also available for Windows, Papers is not available for Windows, if you want to use it get a Mac).


Papers function as a reference organizer for your references. You have thousands of PDF articles lying around in your computer cluttered and unorganized. It is very difficult to know what is in the files without opening it. If you are using a Mac, Quicklook will allow you to look into the PDF file. However using Papers, this will solve all your problems. Just import all your PDF files into Papers and it will do the rest. Papers can organize your PDF files according to authors, date, names and etc. You can quicklook into the PDF file, read it in full screen or just browse into it. Using the power of Safari tabbed browsing, it can have multiple tabs within Papers. If you have a PDF paper without any citated info within it, you can search the info from within Papers and match it into your article. The best thing is that, Papers is linked with most of the scholar search engine named Pubmed, Google Scholar and etc. The best thing about Papers, is that you can import or export the files that you have saved in Papers to EndNote.


Since papers only organize the PDF files, you need another software to help you to write. It is important that you can cite while you write. This is where EndNote comes in. EndNote is also a Reference Manager. Unlike Papers, it allows you to cite while you write. But why you need to use Papers since EndNote is also a Reference Manager? Papers has a function where you can open the PDF file within the programme, unlike EndNote. For EndNote, to view the PDF file, you still need to open the file using either Adobe Reader or Preview. However the new EndNote version X1 and X2 allows you to search while in the EndNote itself. Pubmed is usually the default search engine. It also allows you to search full text article if it is available free to you. However for subscribed journals, it also allows you to key in your username and password. Most of the common libraries are listed in the EndNote. EndNote also has EndNote Web which allows you to have your reference to be online in the EndNote server. For those who have never heard about EndNote, this is what EndNote do. It helps you to organize your references while you write. Different journals have different styles especially when you want to cite an article. Some journals want it to be superscript, some want it next to the reference. For references, some journals want the whole list of authors listed while some only want the first three, with the rest et al. This is where EndNote help you in doing all these. You can choose which journal you want to send the article to, and EndNote will do the rest. Lets say, 6 months on the road, your paper is rejected by the first journal. You just open EndNote and change the name of the journal and EndNote will change the paper style exactly according to the second journal requirements. Easy......

Now, there is no reason for you not to write........