Dissertation, Endnote, Government Documents/Modifying Format

[Anxious Dissertator]

Hi - This maybe answered somewhere else, but I searched and didn't really find anything close to what I want to know. I'm a long-time Endnote user, but I hate Endnote 8 (it was clearly adapted for the Mac from PC - ick.) And I want a native Mac program for bibligraphies. I'm using the trial version of Bookends, and I like it. (Particularly how you can attach a document to the citation!) But, here are my questions:

1. I already have 300 some pages of a dissertation with endnote citations. Is there any way of switching these existing citations to bookends, or getting bookends to recognize those citations if I import all of my endnote library? Or would this be a manual cut-and-paste job?

2. I use a lot of government documents -- is there an add-in reference format for them

3. To conform to the citation style required by my field, I need to be able to make significant modifications to the citation reference fields -- I do like that this is possible in Endnote. What's it like in Bookends? (The answer is probably in the manual... I know...)

Thanks!
A.D.

[Jon]

1. I already have 300 some pages of a dissertation with endnote citations. Is there any way of switching these existing citations to bookends, or getting bookends to recognize those citations if I import all of my endnote library? Or would this be a manual cut-and-paste job?

Hi Anxious (I feel like Anne Landers),

Well, if you can export/import XML to Bookends (you need at least EN 7 for that), Bookends will keep the unique id # for each reference. Then change the citation delimiter in Bookends (Preferences) to square brackets, if that's what you used with EN. Finally, unformat your EN-formatted Word document so the temporary citations are showing. At this point you can probably scan your dissertation with Bookends. There will be some things to clean up, no doubt, but by and large I think this should work.

Perhaps others who have done something similar can comment...

2. I use a lot of government documents -- is there an add-in reference format for them

Formats are for bibliographies. Do you mean reference Type? No, but you can easily create one in Preferences (up to 10 user-defined Types).

3. To conform to the citation style required by my field, I need to be able to make significant modifications to the citation reference fields -- I do like that this is possible in Endnote. What's it like in Bookends? (The answer is probably in the manual... I know...)

Hm, not sure what you are getting at here. You can rename fields (Preferences again) as a function of Type. If you give an example perhaps I can give you a better answer.

Jon
Sonny Software

[niklas]

1. I already have 300 some pages of a dissertation with endnote citations. Is there any way of switching these existing citations to bookends, or getting bookends to recognize those citations if I import all of my endnote library? Or would this be a manual cut-and-paste job?

Hi Anxious (I feel like Anne Landers),

Well, if you can export/import XML to Bookends (you need at least EN 7 for that), Bookends will keep the unique id # for each reference. Then change the citation delimiter in Bookends (Preferences) to square brackets, if that's what you used with EN. Finally, unformat your EN-formatted Word document so the temporary citations are showing. At this point you can probably scan your dissertation with Bookends. There will be some things to clean up, no doubt, but by and large I think this should work.

Perhaps others who have done something similar can comment...

Yes, I can verify that this works fine. At least it did for me. The only cleanup I needed to do was when I had inserted prefix information into a citation (like "see" or "e.g."). Otherwise the process was surprisingly smooth. Oh and I had to change the default citation delimiters from {} to [].

Best regards, Niklas