You can use an Excel spread sheet as the basis for your literature matrix for your review. There is a Referencing Style in EndNote that is set up to export tab delimited records for each reference to a text file that can be copied and pasted into a spread sheet.
The fields it will export are Reference Type, Author, Year, Title, Secondary Title, Volume, Number, Pages, Publisher, Place Published, URL, DOI, Keywords, and Abstract. You can edit the style file to change these if you like, e.g. you might want to include the name of the database, or the Notes or Research Notes fields. If you edit the style, choose your edited version at step 3 of the short way, or step 7 of the longer way.
You can export batches of references from EndNote to Covidence if you're using it for the screening, data extraction and quality assessment components of your high level literature review.
It's a two part process. First you export your EndNote references to a file. Then you import that file into Covidence.
Note: Your XML file must be created in EndNote for it to work in Covidence.
It is possible to edit a single field in a batch of selected references in one go. This can save you time when you are tidying up your library, or organising it to make it more searchable. For example you can:
NOTE: This type of editing is not reversible, so use it with care.
Here are 2 examples of how this function can be used.
The Keyword field of an EndNote record is searchable. If you add keywords to your references, you can find them by searching your library for those keywords.
If you are doing a high level review, this use of the Change/Move/Copy Fields function can be useful in managing your search results, data mining and screening. If you label your references like this, you can generate a Subject Bibliography in EndNote that has the search details and the article abstracts in a single document. (See Create a subject bibliography.)
For this example, I’m using the Label field to record the database, search string and date searched. This field is never populated with data from database records, so I can safely use Replace Whole field with.
NOTE: If you are using other fields such as Notes or Database, which are sometimes populated with information from the database record, it is a good idea to use either Insert after a field’s text or Insert before a field’s text. This keeps any text already in those fields and gives you the opportunity to review it.
Subject Bibliographies are lists of selected references grouped under the text entered into one or more fields in the records. Separate lists will appear for unique text in each field, e.g. if you have articles by 10 different primary authors, a Subject Bibliography on the Author field will have 10 headings – 1 for each author.
You can select any of the fields in an EndNote record for this function. However, it is only effective if you systematically record the data you are going to use to create the Subject Bibliography headings.
You can use a subject bibliography as the basis for your literature matrix for your review. Below is one example of how to do this.
For this example, I'm using the Label field. See Use Change/Move/Copy Fields to organise batches of references for how to batch edit the Label field for use in a subject bibliography.
You now have a full list of the references you found, complete with abstracts, and sorted by individual searches on specific dates. This list will be useful for the data extraction, screening and writing phases of your review.
There are times when it is useful to have a list of references that isn’t linked to your writing. For example, you may want to send a list of references to your supervisor to see if you’re on the right track with your research.
You can create an independent reference list without using Cite While You Write. It is possible to select and copy formatted citations directly from your EndNote library into a blank document. The resulting list will not contain EndNote formatting, so there will be no direct links to your EndNote library.