Researchers and teachers are all well aware of the difficulty of "keeping up with the literature". It's hard enough to find the time to locate and read everything relevant to your interests, and harder still to store the results so that you can quickly track down references, months or even years after you first read them. Many have started some kind of card index for this purpose, but most abandon it sooner or later because a system of filing by one criterion, such as author name, does not permit easy searching by another, such as specific keywords. Nor does it help much with the tedious task of inserting citations in a manuscript (for book, journal article, thesis etc), and compiling and formatting the corresponding bibliography. The latter task becomes even worse if citations and bibliography have to be re-formatted through several revisions of a manuscript, or for re-submission to another journal!

Indexed computer abstract services are now available for almost every field of academic endeavor, either by on-line access to large computer databases or from distribution services which allow individual users to use their own computers to search reference databases and extract "downloads" of those references meeting specific search criteria. Bibliographic software applications such as EndNote provide database files structured for systematic storage of reference data (author(s), title, year, journal, publisher etc), either entered from the keyboard or extracted from service downloads. Personal databases can then be quickly sorted or searched, and sub-sets of references to particular topics can easily be extracted. Individual references can be annotated, and extra fields can be added to contain additional information, such as cross-referencing to your reprint collection.

This alone provides tremendous advantages in terms of time saved and efficiency - but programs like EndNote also provide much more. They can be used with suitable word processors to allow insertion of citations in manuscripts with no more effort than a few mouse clicks, and automatic compilation and formatting of in-text citations, footnote citations and document bibliographies - each in an appropriate user-selected bibliographic style. EndNote comes with over 3,000 pre-defined styles (each appropriate to a particular journal or other publication medium), but it can also "learn" almost any of the thousands of other styles used in less popular publication media. If you want your in-text citations to appear as something like "(Smith, 1983)", or "(Smith, Jones et al., 1983)", or "[17]", or any of many other variants, then you have only to select or define a "style" and it will be done for you - automatically! If you want journal names in your bibliography to be printed in italics, or underlined, and you want volume numbers in bold face, issue numbers in (parentheses), a colon between issue number and pagination - then specify the style and EndNote will do the hard work for you. Other than entering a reference initially to your database, you don't need to type a word - in most cases, adding a reference to your manuscript and its bibliography involves no more than a simple mouse-click or "copy-and-paste" operation.

If you need to change the formatting style (e.g. to submit a manuscript to a different journal), you need only select the new style and EndNote will re-format citations and bibliography to the new specifications.

In summary, EndNote is, firstly, a database manager, specialising in storing, managing and locating bibliographic references in your private reference "library". It is also a bibliography-maker which can locate cited works in its databases and build and format appropriate lists automatically. You can use it in conjunction with your word processor to select and enter text and/or footnote citations (footnote access is not available in some word processors), and it can scan the resulting manuscript to format the citations and compile and format an appropriate bibliography. Formatting is done in accordance with rules that you specify - EndNote is provided with thousands of common formatting "styles", and others are available from EndNote's web site or through user groups. You can easily define your own formatting styles if you wish. Once you have defined a style, EndNote stores it on disk, so that you can use it again without having to re-define it. You can easily share styles with colleagues who write for the same journals as you do. This can be useful, for example, for graduate students writing theses in a department or faculty that has its own unique reference formatting rules - as many do.