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Petition for Endnote Support in OmniOutliner Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
I've started this thread to serve as a petition for the OmniOutliner developers to include support for Endnote or other reference manager softwares.

As a graduate student who writes research papers, it's imperative to have accurate reference citations. One wonderful feature of Endnote is its "cite while you write" with Microsoft Word, but Word's outlining feature is extremely frustrating. I'm forced to use Word anyway because reference citation takes precedence over ease of use, even as frustrating as the Word outliner is. This is the one feature that is keeping me from using OmniOutliner for all of my writing needs.

The OmniOutliner developers were willing to cater to this request if there was enough demand for this feature. If you'd like to see Endnote supported in OmniOutliner, please make yourself heard here.
 
Unfortunately, there is sweet FA that OmniGroup can do here. It is up to EndNote to support OmniOutliner, not the other way around and the chances of that happening are a big fat zero.

You might have better luck trying to persuade the developer of Bookends to add CWYW support for OmniOutliner to their software, but again, it is up to them to add it and not the other way around.

However, you do know that EndNote (and Bookends, I think) are able to use .rtf files (which OmniOutliner exports) with the citations in them as source files to create reference lists? It doesn't update the reference listing as you write, but converts them on the final rtf file.
 
"Cite while you write" sounds like a good idea, but its implementation is actually problematic for several reasons, including 1) the in-text citations substantially slow Word's scrolling, 2) in-text citations can do unpredictable things when documents are shared, and 3) when numbered citation styles are used, in-text citations aren't particularly informative at first glance.

As an alternative, BibDesk is a very nice open source reference manager that was orginally developed for LaTeX/BibTeX applications, but is actually capabile of EndNote-like functionality. I've written a set of Applescripts for BibDesk called CiteInPages (http://jhh.med.virginia.edu/main/CiteInPages/) that support insertion working citations into Pages (v. 3) documents, and replacement of the working citations with numbered or author-date in-text citations and generation of appropriately-formatted bibliographies. The working citations are BibDesk cite keys, which can have a form similar to author-date citations and are thus directly informative. They are also completely expressed as text and don't cause scrolling slowdowns or "mutate" on sharing. The Applescripts are available under a BSD license and contain commented code required to process numbered or author-date citations. Someone familiar with Applescript wouldn't have much trouble adapting them for OmniOutliner.

Last edited by jharrison; 2008-01-18 at 05:41 PM..
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by jharrison View Post
"Cite while you write" sounds like a good idea, but its implementation is actually problematic for several reasons, including 1) the in-text citations substantially slow Word's scrolling, 2) in-text citations can do unpredictable things when documents are shared, and 3) when numbered citation styles are used, in-text citations aren't particularly informative at first glance.
I agree, the Cite while you write has room for improvements. In text citations do slow Word scrolling for documents that contain over 50-100 references, but this can be overcome by working from separate documents and then combining them for the final version. The traveling library attached to the documents is supposed to allow collaborators to reformat the document as they please. I haven't done much sharing of documents so far, but I imagine that problems could arise although I have yet to test this out. And I agree, numbered citations are not informative when assembling a manuscript. Fortunately, you are not restricted to numbered citations when using CWYW...you're free to use any format you want such as Author, Date, which I prefer to use.

The only disadvantage to CWYW that I see now is the lag with large documents.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jharrison View Post
As an alternative, BibDesk is a very nice open source reference manager that was orginally developed for LaTeX/BibTeX applications, but is actually capabile of EndNote-like functionality. I've written a set of Applescripts for BibDesk called CiteInPages (http://jhh.med.virginia.edu/main/CiteInPages/) that support insertion working citations into Pages (v. 3) documents, and replacement of the working citations with numbered or author-date in-text citations and generation of appropriately-formatted bibliographies. The working citations are BibDesk cite keys, which can have a form similar to author-date citations and are thus directly informative. They are also completely expressed as text and don't cause scrolling slowdowns or "mutate" on sharing. The Applescripts are available under a BSD license and contain commented code required to process numbered or author-date citations. Someone familiar with Applescript wouldn't have much trouble adapting them for OmniOutliner.
Endnote has other great features such as searching online databases, easily importing references, and it automates citation formats. I'd be interested to know if Bibdesk has these features too. I'd also be interested to know if you make a document from Pages and format it with Bibdesk as you suggest, can you share this document with others who likely use Word and Endnote.
 
With respect to the lag, it's noticable on my 1.5 Ghz G4 Powerbook with regular manuscripts, ie. ~30 EndNote references in 6000 words. It's usable, of course, but the citations sort of "catch" as you try to scroll by.

Quote:
Originally Posted by nhammell View Post
Endnote has other great features such as searching online databases, easily importing references, and it automates citation formats. I'd be interested to know if Bibdesk has these features too. I'd also be interested to know if you make a document from Pages and format it with Bibdesk as you suggest, can you share this document with others who likely use Word and Endnote.
BibDesk is pretty good in this respect. It imports Medline, RIS, BibTeX, and a number of other formats (EndNote's XML, for example) directly. You can import RIS or Medline files saved from online searches. If you can display a Medline or BibTeX listing in the Web browser, you can just select the text and drag/drop it on the BibDesk window to import. BibDesk will also search Medline, the Web of Science and the Library of Congress directly from within the program, and it has an internal WebKit-based display that will allow you to search and import directly from Google Scholar, CiteULike, HubMed and the ACM Portal. You run the Web interfaces from within BibDesk, and it grabs the BibTeX from the returned data in the background and sets up a list of returned items for you to inspect and import directly.

It also manages and autofiles multiple files per reference (including PDFs and Web links) with display of active (page-able) thumbnail previews that respond to QuickLook in Leopard. If you annotate or highlight PDFs in Skim, those annotations and highlights are visible as listings in BibDesk and can be included in exported bibliographic summaries. Finally, it has a very flexible templating system for specifying the format of displays within BibDesk and exported data.

What it doesn't have is the prebuilt journal formats, which are a significant convenience. Other than that, though, I've been really impressed.

As to round-tripping documents between Pages and Word, it's worked for me with manuscripts and grants that have embedded images, but not particularly complex layouts. In Pages v. 3, the change tracking and comments also round-trip, which is necessary. Of course, you can't round-trip with EndNote embedded references, but you can with the text citations that I use with CiteInPages. In fact, you can drag new references from BibDesk into the Word document because it's just a text drag & drop. But you need to do the final formatting in Pages.
 
I totally agree that BibTex is a better way to go. Endnote, for all of it's wonderful attributes, is a pain in the butt on OS X. It gets upgraded too many times, and the upgrades usually are not compatible with the version of word or OS X that comes next.

I'm dying to switch to BibTex, and this is exactly the incentive I needed! God bless you!

Payam

Quote:
Originally Posted by jharrison View Post
As an alternative, BibDesk is a very nice open source reference manager that was orginally developed for LaTeX/BibTeX applications, but is actually capabile of EndNote-like functionality. I've written a set of Applescripts for BibDesk called CiteInPages (http://jhh.med.virginia.edu/main/CiteInPages/) that support insertion working citations into Pages (v. 3) documents, and replacement of the working citations with numbered or author-date in-text citations and generation of appropriately-formatted bibliographies. The working citations are BibDesk cite keys, which can have a form similar to author-date citations and are thus directly informative. They are also completely expressed as text and don't cause scrolling slowdowns or "mutate" on sharing. The Applescripts are available under a BSD license and contain commented code required to process numbered or author-date citations. Someone familiar with Applescript wouldn't have much trouble adapting them for OmniOutliner.
 
 


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