EDIT 8990: Doctoral Seminar: Using Endnote for Comps

Endnote (and other citation managers) are indispensable to graduate students.  They:

• Download meta data about citations directly from databases
• Attach pdfs and any other file directly to the citation
• Organize the citation information in Groups
• Insert citations into Word documents and format them into virtually any citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc)

An often unused feature of Endnote is the ability to add notes directly to a citation.  This is incredibly useful for studying for Comprehensive Exams because you can make Endnote aggregate all of your notes into one place, and generate a Word document from your notes.

It is a little complicated to do this, so I've gone ahead and done some of the work for you by creating a style just for Comps use.

Download it here.

To save the style I created for you, open up the Styles Folder:

You can easily add notes to each citation you download.  Simply double click on the citation.

A new window will open up with all the available fields.  Scroll down to "Research Notes."

Type in your notes.  The Research Notes field will hold several pages worth of single-spaced text.

When you're ready to create a Word document with your aggregated notes, choose the APA 6th - Research Notes style.

Click on "File" in the top menu, and choose "Export" to generate your Word document.

Under "Save as Type" choose "Rich Text Format."

Name your file and click Save.

Your document will have all your Research Notes and citations in one place.

If you want to create your own style from scratch, you can create one based on a different style and add to it.

Click on Bibliography, and Insert Field to add information to each Reference type in the citation style.

If you click on Layout you can change the style of the citation (paragraphs, indents, etc.)