Hi everybody. I’ve been trying to add EndNote X8 as a citation manager, but I can’t figure out how. Maybe I’m just blind to some obvious option somewhere. Do any of you guys know what to do?
Hi, LL,
I am a longtime Endnote user and do use it with Scrivener. If you search this forum, you will find detailed discussions of the ins and outs of working with citations and bibliographic material, and Endnote in particular.
But here is a quick answer for you: You will use what Endnote refers to as ‘temporary citations’ when working in Scrivener. Temp cites are what the Copy command places on the clipboard when you have a cite or some cites selected in Endnote. You paste these wherever you want to place a reference in your text. If you have not worked with temporary cites before, you should check out the Endnote manual to learn the various ways to properly customize them (add pg numbers, suppress author name, etc.).
Then, when you are ready to compile your draft, you can do this in a number of ways. You can compile to Word format and then open the result in Word and tell Endnote to format your citations and generate a bibliography – this works using Endnote’s CWYW plugin for Word. Alternatively, you can bypass Word altogether by compiling to rtf format. The Endnote app can process RTF files directly. After you have Endnote do that, you would need to do whatever touchup you want to do in an app that can read rtf files.
Hope this is helpful. If you have been used to using (aka spoiled by) Endnote’s CWYW plugin in for Word, this will be a different way of working. When you get used to it, you may come to see, as many Endnote users here do, that it is a preferable way of working - it is simple, textually-transparent and keeps you in charge. It also has the clear advantage of making your writing less locked-in and vulnerable to becoming inaccessible due to shifts in proprietary complexities.
gr
P.S. Note, you can set Endnote as your citation manager in Scrivener. This just enables the cmd-Y shortcut in Scriv to (to launch and) bring forward Endnote when you invoke it.
Can I enter my cites into Word, using CWYW, export them then to Scrivener? That could eliminate some of the chances of entry errors, couldn’t it?
I’m no expert so I could well be wrong, but as far as I am aware and of what I understand of how it works, that would not be a good approach, in the same way that you can’t get back to a Scrivener project from a compiled PDF or even word processing file. It’s a formatted result that you get, that wouldn’t any longer (at least outside of Word) be tied to anything in your Endnote database.
I don’t know what errors you refer to though. The normal way of working with third-party tools and Endnote isn’t error prone. If anything it is more stable and simple, more difficult to “break”, because you are using markers that are as solid as text. It’s fancy flashing blinking lights stuff like these plugins that only work when you’re looking at them just so, in just the right context. A placeholder marker though can survive passing through a manual typewriter if you really wanted to!
Am I reading my web research correctly in that there is no Cite While You Write for EndNote / Scrivener 3? If so, that is unfortunate because it makes the job that much more difficult.
If I did it this way I would have CWYW in Word, then I cud export the cites to Scrivener 3, yes?
For any citation workflow with Scrivener, you do not use CWYW, nor do you need it. You use plain text citation tags (TC), unique IDs that are simply more robust and less prone to bugs. I’ve had to deal with several document corruptions from students or colleagues using CWYW over the years, and my recommendation is, even if you use only Word + Endnote, turn it off. But that is my own personal advice. The choice nevertheless is clear, if you want to benefit from Scrivener’s superior writing system, you use plain text temporary citations.
Here are some instructions for the TC workflow for Endnote, though note I use macOS so there may be some subtle differences for Windows:
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