Using Scrivener with reference software (wiki)

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Endnote (Clarivate Software) [macOS & Windows]

Endnote is often available to academic users through a University site licences and is probably the most heavily used reference managers around. Endnote has a CWYW plugin that locks you into using Microsoft Word, but for Scrivener users Endnote also supports robust temporary citations.

Set Endnote as your citation manger in Scrivener’s settings:

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Inserting temporary citations

To insert a temporary citation, you can use Insert > Bibliography/citations (⌘Y on macOS) in Scrivener to switch to Endnote, then search and select your reference, then Edit > Copy (⌘C on macOS) and paste it into Scrivener. The temporary citation will look like this (in this case two references seperated by a ;:

{Adolphs, 2009 #3521; Clutton-Brock, 2021 #7164}

You can insert a text prefix / suffix or other text using this template: {Prefix \Author, Year #Record-Number Suffix}, so for example to add a page number prefix would be {see p.21 \Adolphs, 2009 #3521}. See Endnote’s help for more details.

Compile options:

  1. DOCX ⇨ Microsoft Word: this is the most obvious compile target as Endnote’s plugin is best supported by Microsoft Word. The plugin can convert temporary citations into formatted ones.
  2. ODT / RTF ⇨ Endnote’s Format Paper: Endnote can scan and format a document from within Endnote. According to the help it supports scanning the following: “Microsoft® Word, OpenOffice Writer, LibreOffice Writer, Apple Pages, Scrivener, Nisus Writer, TextEdit , Mellel, and almost any other application that can save as RTF (Rich Text Format)” — for Scrivener users that means using ODT / RTF / DOCX compile outputs.
  3. LaTeX / Markdown: Endnote can export its database to BibTeX. This can be used by Pandoc and LaTeX tools. One caveat is the temporary citations that are exported are not consistent with those copied by default. Potential solutions are to edit the temporay citation options OR edit the BibTeX output format to make these consistent. See this PDF from Imperial College for more details.

Tips

It is sometimes easy to convert the temporary citations from Endnote to those used by LaTeX or Pandoc, as long as your BibTeX citation key is in the firstauthor-year format, so for example {Smith, 2012 #342} can become [@smith2012]

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