Published February 5, 2019 This content is archived.
James Lenker, PhD, OTR/L is a professor in UB’s Department of Rehabilitation Science. He told UBIT how he uses EndNote to organize his research, which focuses on community-based outcomes in computer-based assistive technology, office ergonomics and other areas.
I was a very early adopter of EndNote, beginning around 2000 as I was starting my PhD program. I’ve been using it steadily ever since—now I’ve got around 1,400 articles, organized by topic and easily searchable.
Something I learned early on was to avoid creating separate libraries for each paper you’re working on or each thematic area. Ultimately, it’s much more efficient to maintain a single library that houses all of one’s references.
For each reference that I save in my library, I input one or more descriptors in its “keywords” and/or “label” fields. In that way, I can search my library for references that are in a particular thematic area.
In addition, one can search on author names, journal names, year of publication, etc., to find a specific article or group of related articles. This approach allows your library to grow over time as one’s spheres of research interest expand.
With each of your libraries dedicated to a particular subject, you can use EndNote’s keywords to tag each article in a way that makes sense to you; they can be specific to the article you’re working on, for example.
When you go back and look at old articles, you wonder, What did I like about this article? What were its main points?
I started writing my own brief synopses for each article in the notes section. That way I can go back and get a sense of what I like about the article or why I thought it was important without having to re-read the entire article.
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