Using Endnote with BibTeX

Noah Hoffman

October 10, 2004

This howto describes the steps involved in using Endnote 6 [#!Endnote6!#] with BibTeX to create a referenced L^ATEX document. Although Endnote can create a BibTeX reference library, for some reason it will not export the reference numbers used to mark temporary in-text citations, and can't automatically generate decent alternative labels. To make the integration between Endnote and LaTeX easier, I wrote a couple of Python scripts to generate citation labels (endnlib.py) and replace temporary Endnote citations with BibTeX-style citations (texref.py).

This method creates a label for each reference which will ultimately be used in both the Endnote and BibTeX citations, and has the following advantages:

• Endnote can be used to create and manage reference libraries, and to insert references into a document.
• Temporary citations inserted using Endnote do not contain L^ATEXunfriendly characters; thus draft versions with unformatted citations can be compiled.
• Either BibTeX or Endnote can be used to format the final bibliography (although only the former method is described in this document).
• In-text citations are logically named, and do not depend on arbitrary reference numbers which might differ between reference libraries.

You will need Python 2.2.x, and texref.py and endnlib.py (available at www.unc.edu/~nghoffma/software.html) to use this method.