EndNote is a commercial reference management software package, used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays, reports, and articles. EndNote was written by Richard Niles, and ownership changed hands several times since it was launched in 1989 by Niles & Associates: in 2000 it was acquired by Institute for Scientific Information’s ResearchSoft Division, part of Thomson Corporation, and in 2016 by Clarivate (then named Clarivate Analytics). EndNote’s main competitors are Mendeley and Zotero. Unlike Mendeley and Zotero, EndNote is neither free-to-use nor offers a freemium model.
Features
EndNote groups citations into “libraries” with the file extension *.enl and a corresponding *.data folder.
There are several ways to add a reference to a library: manually, or by exporting, importing, copying from another EndNote library, or connecting from EndNote. The program presents the user with a window containing a dropdown menu from which to select the type of reference they require (e.g., book, congressional legislation, film, newspaper article, etc.), and fields ranging from the general (author, title, year) to those specific to the kind of reference (abstract, author, ISBN, running time, etc.)