EndNote

Editor: Handong Gui

I. INTRODUCTION

EndNote is a commercial reference management software produced by Clarivate

Analytics (previously by Thomson Reuters). It is the most widely used tool to manage

academic references and generate citations when writing papers. Users can save, group, and

note the references for their convenience and also export them into word documents (like

papers or thesis) automatically with regulated format.

II. INSTALLATION

UTK students can download and use EndNote for free.

1. Go to https://libguides.utk.edu/endnote

2. Click and log in with UT ID to download EndNote.

3. Download and install EndNote.

III. REFERENCE MANAGEMENT

A. Create Library

All the references in EndNote are saved in ‘Library’. Normally, one person only needs

one library to organize all the references he has.

1. Launch Endnote, click File->New… to create a Library (file extension *.enl) at

wherever you want. You will find the Library file as well as a folder with *.data extension.

Note that all the references including the downloaded PDFs will be saved in this folder.

2. A blank library appears. The left part is Group panel, which shows the groups in this

library. The middle part is the Reference List panel, which shows the basic information of the

references in the selected groups, like authors, title, journal name, year et. cl. The right part is

Tabs panel, which includes Reference panel, Preview panel and PDF Viewer panel, showing

the detailed information of the selected reference in the group and the preview of the attached

PDF. You can custom the layout of the panels by clicking the bottom at right corner.

B. Import References

For EE students, the main resources of references include Google Scholar and IEEE

Xplore.

1) From Google ScholarActually this is the easiest way to import references to EndNote since almost all the

academic resources can be found in Google Scholar.

For example, we want to search for a reference called “Active gate driver for crosstalk

suppression of SiC devices in a phase-leg configuration” and import it into EndNote.

1. Open Google Scholar and run the searching. Click the quotation symbol and click the

‘EndNote’ at the bottom of the pop-up. Then the reference file called ‘scholar.enw’ is saved to

your computer.

2. Open the downloaded file and the reference will be automatically imported into your

EndNote library. Clicking the imported reference you can see the information of the

reference. Also, you can attach the corresponding paper PDF by clicking the attachment

symbol. Note that the attached PDF will be automatically saved to the *.data folder

mentioned in last section. So you can delete the downloaded PDF from the original place and

the attached PDF in the library will not be affected.

3. If you want to download the reference with only one click, go to the menu of Google

Scholar (at top left corner) and select Settings. At the bottom of the page to Bibliography

Manager and use the drop down menu to show links to import citations into EndNote. Click

on the Save button (bottom of page).

Now whenever you do a search, you will see under each search result a link that says

‘Import into EndNote’. You can download the reference with only one click.

2) From IEEE Xplore

1. Open IEEE Xplore and run the searching. Mark the records that you want to download

as reference. Click ‘Export’ on top and select ‘RIS’ as format in ‘Citations’ tag. The reference

file will be downloaded after clicking ‘Export’. Similar to Google Scholar, opening the

downloaded file can directly import the reference into EndNote.

C. Group and Manage References

1) GroupAfter importing several papers, it is of great importance to well manage these references

so that a paper is easy to find when you want to read it. One of the most effective way is to

categorize the references into different groups with different topics. The structure of EndNote

system is Library-> Group Sets-> Groups. The figure below shows the example of a library

with a lot of references.

It can be observed that there are several Group Sets (named as ‘General’, ‘Converter’,

‘Device and Components’ and so on). Within each Group Sets, there are multiple Groups

(named as ‘Device/ Drive’, ‘Multi-Level’ and so on). The user can create the group system

based on his habits and he can rename and delete the groups easily by right clicking the

Group Sets or Groups. To add a reference to the Group, just drag the reference from the

middle panel into the destination Group. Note that one reference can be put into multiple

Groups.

2) Add NotesAfter reading a paper, it is quite normal to leave some notes for future use. In the

Reference panel, there are two fields where you can add notes: Notes and Research Notes.

Generally speaking, it is more recommended to use Research Notes for your comments and

notes since sometimes the Notes field may have already been populated by some information

such as the size of the book.

3) Change Display FieldsThe Reference List panel is the most direct window to get basic information of a

reference. Therefore, it is essential to have good view of the basic information. The default

fields that shows in the panel include: Author, Year, Title, Rating, Journal, Last Updated,

Reference Type. However, some pieces of this information are not necessary while some

others such as research notes are more desired to be viewed directly. So it is better to custom

the view of the display fields in the Reference List panel.

Click Edit and select ‘Preference’. Selecting the second one ‘Display Fields’ and you can

change the content, name and sequence of the fields. The picture below illustrates an

example.

IV. CITATION AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

The other main function of EndNote is conveniently inserting citations and bibliography

into the article you are writing. With EndNote, there is no need to waste much time manually

typing long titles and author names one by one.

A. Insert Citations in Word

1. After installing EndNote, a plug-in will automatically appear on the tool bar of Word.

2. Go to EndNote and select the references that you want to insert as the citations in the

Reference List panel. You can choose multiple references at one time if you want to insert

them together at the same location in your paper.

3. Go back to Word and place the cursor at where you want to insert the citation. In

EndNote plug-in, choose ‘Insert Citation’ and then ‘Insert Selected Citation(s)’. Then you will

find the citation is automatically generated in Word.

B. Modify Inserted Citations

1. You can change the order of the citations by clicking ‘Edit & Manage Citation(s)’.

2. You can keep the citations in correct order and display by clicking ‘Update Citations

and Bibliography’.

3. The layout (font and paragraph) of the bibliography can be changed by clicking the

expansion of ‘Bibliography’.

C. Change Format and Style of Bibliography

Keeping correct format of bibliography is important but trivial when writing a paper.

Different associations have different requirements in terms of formats. For example, the

requirement of journal paper citation by IEEE is like this: Author name, “Title”, Journal

name, Volume, Issue, Pages, Date, Year. What makes things even more complicated is that the

abbreviation should be used instead of the full name of journal and conference name. For

example, IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics should be written as IEEE Trans. Power.

Electron.. Therefore, a good template with correct format and style should be established.

1) Create format of bibliography1. A lot of formats have already been created and are free for downloading online. Go to

http://endnote.com/downloads/styles and search whether there is the style that you want. Here we

download a style file called ‘Trans Power Sys. ens’.

2. Open the downloaded style file, select ‘File’ and ‘Save as’. Type a name that you want. For

example ‘IEEE Trans Power Sys’. Save it and close the style file.

3. In the main screen of EndNote, select ‘Edit’, ‘Output Styles’ and ‘Open Style

Manager…’. You can find the style ‘IEEE Trans Power Sys’ is included. Mark it and close.

4. Go back to the main screen of EndNote. Use the drop down menu in the tool bar to

select this style. Then it becomes the default style and all the bibliography follows this format.

2) Edit format of bibliographyGenerally, some settings of the downloaded style still cannot meet the requirement and

need modifying. Here the example is still based on IEEE standards.

1. Select ‘Edit’, ‘Output Styles’ and ‘Edit “IEEE Trans Power Sys”’.

2. At the left panel select ‘Journal Names’ and then select ‘Abbreviation 1’. Otherwise,

the full name of the journal or conference will be shown in the bibliography.

3. Select ‘Bibliography’ and ‘Templates’. Here you can customize the format of the

bibliography based on different types of reference.

4. Select ‘Bibliography’ and ‘Author Lists’. Modify it as the following picture.

5. Save it and close.

3) AbbreviationThis may be the most confusing and trivial part. There are so many journals and

conferences and all need abbreviations in citation. Actually, the requirements of the use of

abbreviation in journals and conferences are different based on IEEE standard.

Select ‘Tools’, ‘Open Term List’ and ‘Journal Term List’. You can edit the abbreviation

of all the journals in the library. Note that only journals are automatically included while

conferences need to be manually added.

1. For journal names, each one has standard abbreviation and there is rules inside. You

need to search online to find the proper abbreviations. For example the IEEE journals:

https://www.ieee.org/documents/trans_journal_names.pdf

2. For conference names, there is no need to change terms totally like journal names.

Some standard words need to use abbreviation while the other words do not need. Here is the

standard regulated by IEEE:

https://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/

style_references_manual.pdf