PROCITE vs. ENDNOTE: URGENT!!!
inm...@csc.anu.edu.au
I vaugely remembered someone recently posted a question on Procite vs.
Endnote. I have search through comp.sys.mac.app and comp.sys.mac.digest but I
couldn't find the posting.
Could someone kindly send me some comparison between Procite and
Endnote? A friend of mine need it urgently before she purchase either of them.
Thanks in advance and sorry to waste the bandwidth.
Ida
Jacob L. Cybulski
> I vaugely remembered someone recently posted a question on Procite vs.
> Endnote. I have search through comp.sys.mac.app and comp.sys.mac.digest but I
> couldn't find the posting.
I had a good look at a number of bibliography programs for the Mac
which is our wordprocessing platform. Here is a short overview of
the products I got my hands on (note the prices are in Australian $) :-
RefDB Search Import Styles Citation Price
ProCite built-in and-or various custom MacWrite Pro-Cite $711
fields +DIALOG Text Biblio-Link $370
AutoBib built-in and-or various custom Text $230
fields -DIALOG
EndNote built-in and-or various custom Word EndNote $199
fields +DIALOG MacWrite EndNote Plus $339
WriteNow EndLink $149
WordPerf
WordRef HyperCard as-text LaTex custom Word Shareware $50
SciBib HyperCard 1 field N/A preset N/A Shareware $5
HyperBib HyperCard as-text N/A custom Text Free
BibTex Tex N/A LaTex N/A LaTex Free
ProCite seems to have the most of the features (it is also recommended by La
Trobe library - for the PC), the basic price of $711 (expensive) does not
include the import/export features for which you need to buy Biblio-Link
($370). AutoBiblio looks and feels like a BASIC port from another computer,
it is very slow and violates Macintosh user interface guidelines. EndNote
comes in two versions the first is for writing small papers, but if you deal
with large bibliographic databases you need EndNote Plus which also gives
you powerful searches, sorts and glossaries, you need EndLink ($149) to
access imported bibliographic databases, it is the simplest package to use,
also this is the only package that handles the wordprocessing documents
directly. WordRef, SciBib and HyperBib keep their data in HyperCard and need
to perform several steps before the article gets merged with the
bibliography lists, the first two work with Word via merge-list and thus are
limited to the number of references that could be used (128), HyperBib
requires manual cutting and pasting of references. MacBibTex is a direct
port of BibTex to the Mac and will work with OzTex (horrid), it cannot do
anything.
ProCite, AutoBiblio and EndNote are available in demo versions, so that you
could play with them before you buy. SciBib, HyperBib and MacBibTex are on
sumex, WordRef used to be ftp-able from sumex but I could not find it there
anymore.
After experimentation with all of them I recommend EndNote Plus + EndLink,
of which total cost amounts to $488.
Jacob
P.S. Note that my review process was very superficial, so that I may have
missed some good or bad points of the packages described above!
Steve Bang
>Ida
I have been using Pro-Cite on both the Mac and the IBM for several
years now. I am very impressed by the portability between the two
platforms. This allows me to work on the Mac version (which I consider
the better of the two) and then make a quick binary file transfer of
the database files to the PC when I need to. The new version of Pro-Cite
on the Mac (v. 2.0) should be shipping in the next week or two. The new
version is much faster than the previous version (v. 1.34). Even on my
Mac SE it seems to jump rapidly between records. The previous version
was sluggish on System 7, but that has definitely been fixed -- it now
flies! Another significant improvement is the new Quick Search
capability. Based on indexed searching of selected fields, I can
now find records in seconds (which used to take minutes to do.)
Since I have been using Pro-Cite for a couple of years and am currently
beta testing the new version for the Mac, I admit that I can't say
much about EndNote or EndNote Plus. At UCSB and on consulting jobs,
I have promoted Pro-Cite as a powerful tool for scholarly research as
well as personal/group libraries. Locally, the National Park Service
and the Channel Islands Marine Sanctuary have been using records
downloaded from CD-ROMs to develop research databases. A county
department that I am working with is using Pro-Cite to organize
their slide and aerial photo libraries, newspaper files, journal
articles, technical reports, and even their software collection.
Pro-Cite has 20 pre-defined and 6 user-defined workforms which
can use up to 45 fields for each record. Just about any collection
can be tracked on it, including videotapes, CDs, records, slides,
and photos, books, and journal articles.
Even though I am very satisfied with Pro-Cite, I recently (last week)
purchased their major competitor's product, EndNote Plus. As soon
as I am finished with beta-testing of Pro-Cite 2.0, I will begin
a serious feature-by-feature comparison of the two products. I will
try to post a summary to the net as soon as I have looked at EndNote
in depth. I will be importing a 2,000 record bibliography into EndNote
to compare the speed, searching capabilities, and usability of
the two programs. Unfortunately for Personal Bibliographic Software,
the marketing of Niles and Associates seems to have given EndNote
more visibility in the Mac world. Based on a quick peek at EndNote
Plus, it seems unlikely that I will be switching.
Educational prices are available for Pro-Cite. At UCSB, both the
Mac and the PC versions run about $135.
If you are interested in checking out Pro-Cite, contact Argyl Houser
at Personal Bibliographic Software:
Personal Bibliographic Software, Inc.
P.O. Box 4250
Ann Arbor, MI 48106
(313) 996-1580
PBS just recently hooked into Internet. Send Argyl e-mail at:
ar...@pbsinc.uucp
Also, ask Argyl about their support in Australia. I believe that
they have a sales rep there.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Bang
Sciences-Engineering Library
University of California at Santa Barbara
e-mail: skb...@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu
--
*********************************************************************
Steven K. Bang
Sciences-Engineering Library
University of California at Santa Barbara
Jacob L. Cybulski
> Educational prices are available for Pro-Cite. At UCSB, both the
> Mac and the PC versions run about $135.
> they have a sales rep there.
$135 for ProCite is a very good price, I had a good look at the software and
it is VERY good and even our Uni library is recommending it. The main
disadvantage is that it does not support Word directly (you have to save
your documents either as text or in MacWrite format).
The Australian distributor is :-
InfoMagic Australia Pty Ltd
5 Skyline Place
French Forest
N.S.W. 2086
Ph: (02) 975 1044
Fax: (02) 975 1350
However they told me that they have no educational discounts on Personal
Bibliographic Systems software. Paying $711 for ProCite and $370 for the
the Dialog link is not very cheap for students. So we went for EndNote
which also reads Word files directly and is very easy to use!
Jacob L. Cybulski
Amdahl Australian Intelligent Tools Programme
Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering
La Trobe University
Bundoora, Vic 3083, Australia
Phone: +613 479 1270
Fax: +613 470 4915
Telex: AA 33143
EMail: ja...@latcs1.lat.oz.au
ba...@vax.oxford.ac.uk
powerful and complicated for my needs. Also I work in MS Word and so
there was that drawback.
For the last year my Insitute and hence me has been using EndNote and
then ENPlus. I really like it. We're mostly Mac based here but we
bought the PC version recently for the remaining PCs and find that there
are no real compatibility problems. EN+ is - in my opinion - far more
user friendly and Mac-like than ProCite and handles smallish day-to-day
jobs with ease (I don't often use the text scanning for biblio. output
option - even though that's supposed to be the main point. Instead I
keep a number of small databases on different topics and output directly
when needed - student reading lists, article bibliographies, references
to send by post or email, my own publications list etc.). A word of
warning though - at this Institute we have a large (8,000+) EN+ database
of publications relevant to our discipline. When someone writes an
article or reading list or whatever, any new items are added to the common
database. The problem is that at this size none of the Macs we have (up to
5mb RAM) have enough memory to perform certain global operations (sorting
by refenece number, extracting all the journal articles etc.) and even
using find can take a while. But that is a machine problem rather than
an EN+ problem.
Marcus Banks
Todd R Johnson
>>I have been using EndNote for about 2 1/2 years and I find that it is excellent.
>>It follows the Mac user interface conventions very faithfully. It has very fast
>>searching and in EndNote Plus you can have very extensive indexes created that
>>make searching thousands of items lightening fast. It operates as both a
>>DA and a program. The DA is for use while writing in your favorite Mac word
>>processor (except Nisus). It is truly excellent and intiutive.
>>The mail order prices from MacConnection (800-334-4444) are
>>EndNote 1.3 $85
>>EndNote Plus $145
>>EndLink 1.x about $65 1 10
>>EndLink is a program that interfaces between common online databases, such as
>>DIALOG or MedLine, and EndNote. They may have completed their PC version,
>>but as I never use PC's, I haven't followed the development.
>>EndNote has consistently gotten the best reviews in all the Mac computer
>>mags. I recommend it as highly as possible.
Although I also recommend EndNote over ProCite, people should
be aware of its limitations:
1. It does not support multiple user databases. You will run into
MAJOR problems if you try to access a database while someone else is
using it. Furthermore, if you try to write protect the directory the
database is in, you can no longer print from the database.
2. The reference styles, while easy to set up, are often difficult to perfect.
I've been using EndNote for over a year and I still have to tweak my
formats. It is very difficult to get precisely what you want,
especially if you want to allow for optional fields.
3. It doesn't automatically capitalize reference titles. LaTeX has a
simple and elegant solution to this that could easily be incorporated
into EndNote.
4. You are limited to 15 reference types.
5. The reference types can be modified but they are stored with the
EndNote Prefs file in the System folder and hence it is difficult to
use different sets of reference types. It is also difficult to
associate a fixed set of reference types with a database.
6. You can't select a few references in the database and then print
them. You can only print the entire database.
7. It does not detect citations that appear in footnotes.
8. It does not directly work with FrameMaker or Nisus. There are
hacks to get around these, but they are fairly time-consuming.
All current programs like EndNote suffer because you must keep
two copies of your document: one with the pre-processed in-text
citations and another that is post-processed. If you want to change
the document you must (to avoid version problems) change the
pre-processed version and then reprocess the document. A more elegant
solution is to use something like AppleEvents to link WPs and
bibliography programs together in a tighter fashion. Hopefully an
enterprising company will offer something like this in the near
future.
---Todd
--
Todd R. Johnson Email: t...@cis.ohio-state.edu
Assistant Professor
Division of Medical Informatics
The Ohio State University
David S. McCormick
It follows the Mac user interface conventions very faithfully. It has very fast
searching and in EndNote Plus you can have very extensive indexes created that
make searching thousands of items lightening fast. It operates as both a
DA and a program. The DA is for use while writing in your favorite Mac word
processor (except Nisus). It is truly excellent and intiutive.
The mail order prices from MacConnection (800-334-4444) are
EndNote 1.3 $85
EndNote Plus $145
EndLink 1.x about $65 1 10
EndLink is a program that interfaces between common online databases, such as
DIALOG or MedLine, and EndNote. They may have completed their PC version,
but as I never use PC's, I haven't followed the development.
EndNote has consistently gotten the best reviews in all the Mac computer
mags. I recommend it as highly as possible.
Cheers,
David S. McCormick
MIT-EAPS Geology
Cambridge, MA 02139
dm...@athena.mit.edu
617-253-5747
Dana E. Keil
I'm also quite sure that you can have EndNote display the results
of a search or selection and print only that portion. I don't have
it in front of me to double check, but I'm sure there are more
printing options than just being able to print the whole database.
--
Dana E. Keil Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics
da...@are.Berkeley.EDU University of California, Berkeley
David S. McCormick
>
> 2. The reference styles, while easy to set up, are often difficult to perfect.
> I've been using EndNote for over a year and I still have to tweak my
> formats. It is very difficult to get precisely what you want,
> especially if you want to allow for optional fields.
>
nature of scholarly paper formatting. The ability to achieve the formatting is
in the program, but there are just too many details in the formatting process.
> 6. You can't select a few references in the database and then print
> them. You can only print the entire database.
>
I believe that you can print selected references from EndNote Plus.
It's not very hard to do from regular EndNote: just select the references
you want in the DA, paste them into a new WP document,
and format the document with EndNote application.
> All current programs like EndNote suffer because you must keep
> two copies of your document: one with the pre-processed in-text
> citations and another that is post-processed. If you want to change
> the document you must (to avoid version problems) change the
> pre-processed version and then reprocess the document. A more elegant
> solution is to use something like AppleEvents to link WPs and
> bibliography programs together in a tighter fashion. Hopefully an
> enterprising company will offer something like this in the near
> future.
>
That's a great idea.
> ---Todd
>
> --
> Todd R. Johnson Email: t...@cis.ohio-state.edu
> Assistant Professor
> Division of Medical Informatics
> The Ohio State University
>
>
Cheers,
Todd R Johnson
>>Current versions of EndNote do pick up references in footnotes.
>>
"EndNote Plus ignores all footnotes, so you can't cite a
reference in a footnote. You must cite it in the text and copy it to
the footnote after formatting."
This is truly brain damaged behavior.
Dana E. Keil
>In article <dana.68...@are.Berkeley.EDU> da...@are.berkeley.edu (Dana E. Keil) writes:
>>>Current versions of EndNote do pick up references in footnotes.
>>>
>From pg 206 of the EndNote Plus manual:
> "EndNote Plus ignores all footnotes, so you can't cite a
> reference in a footnote. You must cite it in the text and copy it to
> the footnote after formatting."
>This is truly brain damaged behavior.
> ---Todd
You're right, it was brain damaged, that's why they fixed it.
From the EndNote Plus 1.1 new version information:
"Footnotes in Microsoft Word 4.0 papers are now scanned for
temporary citations. These are formatted and numbered (if
appropriate) along with the citations in the main text."
Or are you using some other word processor? I guess it only does it
for MS Word documents at this point.
Todd R Johnson
>>From the EndNote Plus 1.1 new version information:
>>"Footnotes in Microsoft Word 4.0 papers are now scanned for
>>temporary citations. These are formatted and numbered (if
>>appropriate) along with the citations in the main text."
This appears to be a stealth fix. We received information about an
upgrade but it was supposed to only fix some problems with MacWrite II
(or something like that). They went out of their way to say that
nothing else was fixed. Looks like we'll be upgrading.
Are there any other changes? I've noticed that in EndNote Plus 1.0
under System 7 the pointer gets stuck as a watch. Any fixes in this area?
>>
>>Or are you using some other word processor? I guess it only does it
>>for MS Word documents at this point.
Actually, I'm now using FrameMaker for most things. EndNote
replaces footnotes in Frame documents because I have to process the
document in MIF (Maker Interchange Format) which is text only, but
retains all the formatting.
Avi Rappoport
know of was in the February 1989 MacUser, where EndNote got 4.5 mice and
Pro-cite got 3.5 mice. EndNote Plus got 5 mice in a review in the
September 1991 MacUser, and a very good rating in a review in the April
16, 1991 MacWEEK.
Per-box, EndNote is considerably cheaper than Pro-cite, but we don't
have any university site licenses. Where they have site licenses, they
can become cheaper.
t...@pons.cis.ohio-state.edu (Todd R Johnson) writes:
>In article <dana.68...@are.Berkeley.EDU> da...@are.berkeley.edu
(Dana E. Kei l) writes:
>>>From the EndNote Plus 1.1 new version information:
>>>"Footnotes in Microsoft Word 4.0 papers are now scanned for
>>>temporary citations. These are formatted and numbered (if
>>>appropriate) along with the citations in the main text."
>This appears to be a stealth fix. We received information about an
>upgrade but it was supposed to only fix some problems with MacWrite II
>(or something like that). They went out of their way to say that
>nothing else was fixed. Looks like we'll be upgrading.
OK, it was a "stealth" fix. We will send upgrades to those who need
footnotes formatted, but it will take a while, as we are very busy these
days sending out upgrades to MacWrite II and WordPerfect 2 users. If
you actually cite bibliographic references in footnotes, you can get
your free upgrade by writing to me by mail or e-mail. We will ship them
when we can...
>Are there any other changes? I've noticed that in EndNote Plus 1.0
>under System 7 the pointer gets stuck as a watch. Any fixes in this
area?
In general, the problems with the watch cursor come from switching from
Microsoft Word to EndNote. There's not much we can do about this,
though I admit it's annoying. We will try to check the state of the
watch on activate events.
As always, feel free to ask any tech support questions by e-mail.
--
-- Ask me about EndNote and about MacInfo, our db of Macintosh literature --
Avi Rappoport 2000 Hearst, Berkeley, CA 94709
nile...@well.sf.ca.us, 415-649-8176
Niles.Assoc on AppleLink fax: 415-649-8179