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Is direct citation import from journal websites possible?

Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2008 5:00 pm
by aelita
Hi,

I am a BookEnds newbie. Well, actually, I am thinking of switching from Endnote (gasp!) to Bookends. I really like the interface, the tagging, the ease of dealing with a word document, etc. There is just one snag that I haven't figured out. I am a social scientist and I use a LOT of journal publications as my citations. Most of those, however, are not in either JSTOR or PubMed but on a variety of sites like Sage, Blackwell Publishers and a host of smaller journal sites. All of those journals offer a "download citation" utility, which, with Endnote, automatically launches Endnote and imports the citation into the selected database. I can't seem to figure out whether something similar is possible with BookEnds. I can download a reference in a ris format and save it, obviously, but since I have a mac, it saves things without letting me select the name and these files are saved without an extension. I can manually import those files into BookEnds, but, again since I have a mac, I have to manually go add the right extension to the downloaded citation files before I can import the files. Given that when I do a literature search on a new set of topics I sometimes download several dozen citations in one sitting, having to then manually rename and import each file into BookEnds swiftly makes EndNote look much more attractive despite it's horrible drawbacks. I don't want to have to keep an old copy of EndNote just for this particular convenience. Anyone have any workarounds? Any Zotero-based scripts that work with BookEnds? This is my only reason for not switching unless I can find a workaround.

Thanks!
ael

Re: Is direct citation import from journal websites possible?

Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2008 6:58 pm
by Jon
Hi ael,

No need to gasp -- there are lots of EN users here. :-)

There is a shortcut that avoids the need to add an extension to each file name. Just drag the RIS file (or group of files) onto a Bookends database window with the Shift key held down. This forces Bookends to consider them to be text files and offer to import them (rather than attach them).

Jon
Sonny Software