Nick Mariette | SoundsOrange

This article describes how I’ve successfully exported bibliographies from EndNote X on Apple OSX into BibTeX format in the BibDesk application.

Hassles with the older BibTeX output style for EndNote

The older EndNote output style mentioned on this site does not work.  I have spent a number of hours unsuccesfully trying to fix it, so I wouldn’t bother with it, especially since there is an updated style that has fewer problems (see next subheading).

Several problems arise with the old export method, which have lead to many convoluted workarounds as listed on the Lyx Wiki.

The main issues I found were the following BibDesk import errors:

Other issues are that:

• consecutive records of the same type (eg @article) will be grouped together, so that BibDesk will only see one record, not many.
• also, Endnote will not generate citation keys that BibDesk can use.

New BibTeX output style for EndNote

Thankfully, EndNote have released a new BibDesk output style file (dated 12/2/2007) , which is available through EndNote’s website by filtering the many available styles to show only those with the “Export” Discipline:

http://www.endnote.com/support/enstyles.asp
or directly at this URL:
ftp://support.isiresearchsoft.com/pub/pc/styles/endnote4/BibTeX%20Export.ens

The main advantage of this new output style is that it will at least give you proper separation of multiple records of the same type.  I have also worked out separate simple fixes for the other issues.

Instructions for fixing the remaining problems and successfully exporting from EndNote and importing into BibDesk

• In EndNote (tested on EndNote X), edit the style using menu: Edit > Output Styles.

• For each Reference Type, make these changes in the Bibliography > Templates pane:
  • change the top line to remove the leading linefeed and add the text ‘cite-key’ in back-dash quotes.  I.e, change:
    <linefeed>LABEL,<linefeed> to: `cite-key`,<linefeed>
  • UPDATE: Alex Bond emailed me with this suggestion: “Instead of replacing the label on the first line in the bibliography, if you replace it with Record Number the record numbers form Endnote will be made the BibTeX cite-keys.  You can add text before, such as `Text`Record Number which will give you something like Text552 as your cite-key.”
  • change Bibliography > Author Lists and Editor Lists to “list all” authors or editors
  • I like to add a Local-Url entry to all Reference Types, although it only works for normal local URLS (like: file://localhost/Users/…) .  It doesn’t work for the type of local URLs created when Endnote has stored the file in its own directory structure (eg: internal-pdf://paper-1234/paper.pdf)
    `Local-Url = {`Link to PDF`},`
  • I also like to add an entry for @webpage Reference Type, since I have a few website references.  Here’s the text for this Reference Type:

• Be careful to make sure there are 2 line feeds after every new Reference Type you add.  You can compare the new ones to the existing ones to make sure the end of the record looks exactly the same.  If you neglect this, you won’t get separate BibTeX records for consecutive records of the same type (such as @article).

Here’s a screenshot that may help:

• Now save and select your newly edited BibTeX Export.ens file as the current Output Style, and export your Endnote library as a text file.

• Edit the resulting text file in a text editor:
  • remove the top blank line, which has the characters that BibDesk does not like, to avoid this BibDesk error:
    warning        3 characters of junk seen at toplevel

• Now, in BibDesk, open the file using “Unicode (UTF-8)” encoding, instead of “Western (ASCII)”, to avoid this BibDesk error:
  error        Unable to convert characters to encoding Western (ASCII)

• Finally, generate new cite-keys using command-K or the menu: Publication > Generate Cite Key.

Now you should have successfully converted your EndNote library over to BibDesk, without too many problems.  Perhaps you’ll have some missing fields, which you can go back and add into your custom Endnote BibTeX Export.ens output style file.

Hope this works for you as well as it did for me.
Now, back to the thesis writing!