Transferring references from a Word document to EndNote

Having discovered the potential of EndNote for managing references, organising and accessing electronic copies (PDFs), and generating a bibliography, new users will often ask if it is possible to convert a bibliography that they have previously created in Word, to an EndNote library. There is no easy way transfer the information in a Word document into an EndNote Library. The obvious options are to:

• Manually enter all your data into EndNote, using copy-and-paste.
• Locate the references in a database or library catalogue, and download them to EndNote using direct export or a filter. Using the connection file for the Charles Sturt University Library catalogue , or even downloading records from Libraries Australia can help with this process.
  
• Do some basic editing of the Word document so that the references can be imported into EndNote for further manual editing.

If you are working in the biomedical science area, and your bibliography consists largely of journal articles that would be included in the Pubmed database, you may be able to use the HubMed citation finder to automate much of the transfer to EndNote. In a test using a bibliography in a Word document with 20 references (originally found in Medline) I was able to locate and import 50% of these references directly into EndNote without any further editing using HubMed.

Further information and detailed instructions can be found in the EndNote FAQs maintained by the University of Queensland.