EndNote 21: Desktop: Importing PDFs

EndNote can automatically download PDF articles from library subscriptions as well as open access articles online if you configure your settings.

Select the Edit menu, then choose Preferences.

1. Choose the Find Full-Text menu and check all the boxes - DOI, PubMed, etc.

2. Copy the following URL strings into the corresponding boxes:

• OpenURL path: https://libkey.io/libraries/497/openurl
• Authenticate with URL: https://dmu.idm.oclc.org/login?url=

Success! Ready to test it out? Under the References menu, select Find Full Text, then Authenticate. You'll log in using your DMU credentials and you'll know you're authenticated when you see a database list. Then highlight the relevant references and click back on Find Full Text.  EndNote will now be able to retrieve PDF documents from library subscriptions or freely available online. 

A clip icon will be placed next to a reference if its full text is found and attached.

While this feature works pretty well, there will be times when this automated process does not work. For example:

• When there is no free access and/or the library does not have a subscription to the journal
• When the full text is embedded within an EBSCO database and not independently hosted on a journal website the library has a subscription to.

You can import PDFs and have them re-named to a consistent convention by following these steps. From the EndNote Preferences menu, select PDF Handling.  First, decide if you want to EndNote to rename your files automatically for you. In the example below, Author+Year+Title have been selected.

Next, we highly recommend that you enable the PDF Auto Import Folder. This function will automatically connect your downloaded PDFs to the citations in your library.  

First, create a folder on your computer that you plan to consistently download journal PDFs into.  Be careful not to create the folder on OneDrive folder or other file sharing service. In the example above, a folder called MyEndNotePdfs was created on the C:/ drive in a users Documents folder. But you can create the folder on your desktop or anyplace else you remember.  After you create a folder, you can check the box to enable automatic importing, and then select this folder.

• Pro Tip: EndNote makes a copy of the PDF from this folder and places a copy of the pdf in your EndNote Data folder. So on a regular basis, you should delete the pdf documents in this special folder since EndNote already has a copy and you probably don't want duplicates taking up space on your hard drive.  But since the EndNote data file also lives on your computer and not OneDrive, you may want to save PDFs to your OneDrive or a cloud sharing service as a backup copy. This may sound like a lot of extra steps, but if you want automatic importing of PDFs, and you like PDFs linked to the reference in EndNote, this process will prevent problems with file corruption.

Access research papers in one click. Save time accessing full-text PDFs with the free EndNote Click browser plugin.