EndNote 21 guide

To share or collaborate using EndNote Online, you and all your colleagues will need:

• EndNote installed onto your computer
• An EndNote Online account (note: unless you are sharing or collaborating with your whole library - in this case, you will need EndNote Online but your colleagues won't)
• An email account

How it works:

• You can share with anyone using EndNote
• Share your entire EndNote library, including references, PDFs, and annotations, or just specific groups
• You can assign read-only or read-and-write access to different users
• Everyone can add to, annotate and use the library at the same time
• You can review the activity of the changes your collaborators are making
• There’s no charge for sharing, no library size limit and no charge for unlimited cloud storage.

Before attempting to share or collaborate using EndNote Online, make sure you have synced your EndNote library with your EndNote Online account.

Share your whole library

Sharing libraries does not require the other users to have EndNote Online. 

Before sharing, note that this method will automatically share all attached PDFs, and this may put you in breach of copyright (depending on who you are sharing the PDFs with). Please see "How can I avoid infringing Copyright?" on our Copyright Advice page for more information:

If you wish to share your entire library but do not wish to share attached PDFs, add all your references to a new group then follow the instructions below to "Share a group of references".

The EndNote groups function allows you to share a particular group of references with up to 99 other people. Each of those people will need to have their own EndNote Online account. This function does not share PDFs for copyright reasons and will not allow you to share "Smart Groups".

See the "Group references" section of this guide for instructions on how to create a group of references:

To share a group:

1. In EndNote desktop, right click on the group you wish to share
2. Click "Share group"
3. Add email addresses for those with whom you want to share the group. These email addresses must be linked to their EndNote Online accounts.
4. Change the permission to ‘Read Only’, to ensure they will not be able to edit your references
5. Add a message if required
6. Select "Invite"
7. Select "Close"

The invited users will now see the shared groups under "Groups shared by others" (in EndNote Desktop) and "Organize", then  "Others’ Groups" (in EndNote Online).

Once this is done, you can edit, add or remove emails, or adjust access privileges, by going back into the "Share group" window.

Bulk uploading email addresses

If you have a large list of email addresses to share with, it's possible to bulk upload these email addresses and then share a group with them using EndNote Online. To do this, you will need to have the email addresses listed in a text file, with the addresses separated by commas.

To bulk upload email addresses:

1. In EndNote Online, hover over "Organize", then select "Manage My Groups"
2. Tick the "Share" checkbox next to the group you wish to share
3. Select "Manage Sharing"
4. Select "Start sharing this group". This will open an "Add E-mail Addresses to 'New Group'" pop-up window
5. Select "Choose file"
6. Select your prepared text file, then "Open"
7. Select the "Read Only" button 
8. Click "Apply"
9. Close the window.

Collaborate with your whole library

As with sharing, you can also collaborate using your whole library. Remember that this will give all users read and write permissions.

This is the same process as sharing your whole library, except that you will need to choose the "Read & Write" option when adding your collaborators’ email addresses.

Some things to be aware of before collaborating with your whole library:

• Once set up, all collaborators can add, edit, and delete any references or groups, and this includes permanently deleting references and groups from your desktop library. Consequently, you should frequently back up the library (to USB, external hard drive etc.). The only change other collaborators cannot initiate is renaming the library.
• PDFs are automatically shared, so be aware of any copyright and licensing restrictions (see "How can I avoid infringing Copyright?" on our Copyright Advice page)
• Only the person who "owns" the library should back up the library
• Once you have invited collaborators, you can edit, add or remove them, or adjust access privileges by clicking on the "Share Library" button again.
• Once others have started working with your library, you can see the last 500 changes made to it by clicking the "Activity Feed" to the right of the "Sync Status" button. The Activity Feed symbol will only appear once a change has been made to your library by other users. 

Collaborate with a group of references

This is the same process as sharing using EndNote Groups, except that you will need to choose the ‘Read & Write’ option when adding your collaborators’ email addresses.

Some things to be aware of before collaborating with a group of references:

• Once set up, all collaborators can add, edit, and delete any references from the shared group
• Once you have invited collaborators, you can edit, add or remove them, or adjust access privileges by going back to the "Share group" window:
  • In EndNote desktop, right click on the shared group
  • Click "Share group". This will open the "Share group" pop-up window.