The Criminal Price Of EndNote

The Monkey works somewhere that EndNote is the go-to app for bibliographic data collection.  I understand the need for EndNote, but EndNote still is a rather crappy application.

At its most basic, EndNote is nothing more than a specialized database app that is largely built around a plug-in for word processors (primarily Microsoft Word).  The really amusing thing to me is that the way the plug-in works and sees items denoted as entries is very, very old school.  You generally note entries that you want to be bibliographic in natures though some series of special character entries around a name of an author.  Then the plug-in just scours your document for those special characters and looks for the name of the author in the EndNote “library” (i.e. the database) and then proceeds to format the entries with a pre-existing template for a particular Journal.

Here is what EndNote really is all about: templates for journals.

That’s it.  The reality of EndNote has little to nothing to do with with actually collecting the bibliographic entries and keeping them stored.  That’s a pretty standard database.  You could probably built your own by point and clicking your way through FileMaker.  The true purpose of EndNote is that it is nothing more than a Microsoft Word plug-in with a collected set of formatting templates for the thousands of academic journals out there.  The plug-in simply looks at the template and says “Format the entries this way, please.” and then pulls the specific data from the database that is required by that journal.

EndNote is really the only thing out there, too.  There are a few other apps, but EndNote really has this market wrapped up.  They price their application accordingly.  $200 is the general per user cost for EndNote, and they update on a yearly basis, driving that psychological button of panic in academic circles of “That’s new! I need it!  It will give me an advantage over my academic competition!  If it’s new it must be better! Everyone else will be using it! BUY IT! NOW! NOW! NOW!”  EndNote also uses that as an opportunity to charge for basic maintenance fixes that they simply abandon in the previous versions.  In other words, they know there’s a problem in EndNote version X, but they’ll wait until version X1 to fix it and they won’t provide fixes to version X for free at all, because, well, hey, it’s going to be FIXED in the next version, right?  And everyone is going to BUY the next version anyway, right?

EndNote.  I am not a fan.