Faculty tips: organizing decades of research with EndNote

James Lenker, a professor in UB's department of Rehabilitation Science.

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. 

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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.

Keep all of your references in a single library

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.

Use keywords to search easily

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.

Use EndNotes' notes section to remind yourself why you added an article

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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