The Tyranny of EndNote

Like Microsoft Word, EndNote is really quite awful.

EndNote is like someone who appears really helpful at first glance but they more you begin to rely on their help, the more you discover that, far from helping, they are actually dragging you down.

Reference management software should make it easy to maintain a bibliography and format a list of references for an academic paper. EndNote makes it kind of easy to maintain a bibliography and it does make it easy to insert references into a paper because it talks to Word, sort of. Getting those references formatted exactly right is an enormous pain because the templating engine is so poor. I am never quite sure what EndNote is going to do with the formatting of a reference that is slightly non-standard, that is, not a book, a chapter therein, a journal article or a conference paper.

The main problem with EndNote is, like Word, there is so much inertia behind it and simultaneously so little support. We have a site-licence here at work so it’s effectively free. But, the main thing that would make EndNote awesome suck less, shared templates for formatting references for a paper, are, as far as I can see, largely unavailable unless you use the styles that come with EndNote by default. And with so many of them to choose from, unless you know the exact one you want, how can you choose any format with confidence?

Don’teven get me started on how much I hate the user interface.