It’s obviously a lot better than doing it manually, but I just find the database and user interface very clunky, especially in data entry but also display. There are a couple of major sticking points with the reference output, too, because our College of Law style guide is a bit peculiar. Perhaps because I’m used to blog templates, I’m getting frustrated by the lack of flexibility in coding the output styles.

As a former Endnote user, I agree.

I’m now the co-project lead for the OpenOffice bibliographic project, as well as author of this citation style language I’d like to incorporate into our project:

http://xbiblio.sourceforge.net/csl.html

If you want to contribute to open alternatives, let me know if the style language supports your needs. I’m quite aware law is one of the more tricky areas, but think I’ve covered most of what you’d likely need.

Amir

It does seem much more geared to science type degrees, as there are an awful lot of science referencing styles in the program.

But given how advanced word processing and data retrieval have become, and how easy, just for example, blogging interfaces are to use, it does seem ludicrous that there’s not some way that you can just plug in details about the indiosyncratic formatting you require, and it will just magically output the information in the manner you wish. Like, surely it’s not that hard?

…Says the person who’s waiting for her techie boyfriend to work out the problem so that I’m not wasting valuable research time trying to format references in a database, and who still hasn’t worked out how to make blog uploads work…

http://www.lib.unimelb.edu.au/endnote/index.html

I hope it works outside the uni…I’m not sure. This site was created by the librarian responsible for Endnote here.

It might help.

Good luck.