Endnote Travelling Library

DrRZ

I've soured on Endnote and am starting to play with alternatives: Zotero and Mendelay. However, convincing all my colleagues to switch would be non-trivial so any solution I switch do is going to have to interact with Endnote.

Is it possible with Zotero to embed an Endnote travelling library for the references into a word file so that it can be used by someone with Endnote with a minimum of fuss? And of course, is it possible to read a word file and convert the endnote travelling library into Zotero references?

Thanks.

adamsmith

Sorry, you can't collaborate with Zotero and Endnote in one document and that's unlikely to ever be possible, given that Endnote is closed, proprietary, and litigious (which is why it's a very bad idea to trust them with your data in the first place). And yes, that lock-in effect is by design.

(you'll get the same answer - probably in prettier language - by Mendeley).
Currently it's not even really possible to collaborate using Zotero and Mendeley, although there is movement on that front - part of the reason that's possible is that Mendeley uses the same open source citation engine as Zotero.

DrRZ

So can you even export a Zotero library as an Endnote library or is that not possible either? Without some way of going and back and forth I'd need to get everyone to switch, and I frankly don't see that as likely. I'd rather not shell out another $100 just to upgrade from X2 to X4 so it will work in Word 2010, especially given how awful Endnote's interface and how poor their cloud service is compared to the free alternatives, but I may end up having to do just that... :(

adamsmith

Zotero supports various standard export formats such as bibtex and ris that are read by Endnote (I believe Mendeley supports the proprietary .enw in addition) but neither can read or write endnote library files (.enl) and it's likely that Endnote would sue if they tried.
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/06/thomson-reuters-suit-against-zotero-software-dismissed.ars
I'm sorry there's no better news, but this is exactly the type of scenario that open software advocates have in mind when they demand open standards (to clarify - even proprietary software can have and/or follow open standards - as Mendeley does, for example - Endnote just decided to be as evil as possible in this respect).

DrRZ

That's unfortunate, but thanks for the info.

migugg

But, what you can do, and what I still do, is work with both. Switch to zotero, try to convince as many people to switch too (which shouldn't be too difficult, given the advantages of zotero). Then, if you need to collaborate on endnote, order all your items in zotero by date, export those that you have added since last export to endnote (with RIS), and write your collaborative paper with endnote. Obviously, if all you work is collaborative, that doesn't make too much sense.
Another solution is to work with rtf scan feature. You can do that with either endnote or zotero.