Academic writers often face the consequences of uneven categorization of their notes in writing academic research papers. In the process of marshalling or retrieving notes to support complex arguments, writers soon realize that notes taken sporadically and organized haphazardly often do not answer the their call to service at will. Furthermore, searching and recalling these unorganized notes is costly and time consuming. This distraction causes friction in the writing process, disrupting the writer's flow of thoughts. Furthermore, having to build a bibliography from disorganized notes is another tedious yet essential process that wearies most writers. EndNote Plus, an enhanced reference database and bibliography maker, offers a well-organized note system for both bibliography and reference notes — a prerequisite to efficient organization of an academic research paper.

Available to both Mac and PC users (either in Windows 3.1, Windows 95, or Windows 97), EndNote Plus is a database manager fully integrated to word processors (especially Microsoft Word and WordPerfect). With its innovative features, EndNote Plus is particularly useful in creating, storing, managing, searching, and retrieving entries in one's reference library. The principle of creating a reference library using EndNote Plus is essentially the same as the old method used to create and expand a library by hand on cards, but EndNote Plus is less time consuming. EndNote Plus comes with a template that makes entering a reference — with information such as author, title of the book or article, year of publication, publisher, abstract, note, or keywords — into the library convenient and effortless. Each library can store up to 32,000 references, with all of the information required to create a bibliography. But EndNote Plus is not exclusively designed for the purpose of creating a bibliography. Building a library could be perceived as a disciplined way to manage one's reading materials, assimilating and connecting ideas — all of which contribute to the process of cogently organizing one's writing. Take EndNote's "keywords" feature, for example. Using keywords, one can instantly call for all the references organized under specific keywords. This feature is an obvious advantage over the manual chore of searching through index cards.

EndNote Plus plays another role. Loaded with more than three hundred bibliographic styles for a variety of journals (such as APA and MLA), an author can choose a style according to the discipline for which the paper is written. This feature helps tremendously in automatically and correctly formatting a list of cited works. With the reference library mentioned above, one can choose to cite the sources either while one is writing or when the writing is completed. One can also reformat the paper in a different bibliographic style; by choosing the desired style from the "Styles" menus, the citations and bibliography will be converted to the new format.

These two distinct features of Endnotes Plus — an enhanced reference database and a bibliography builder — could make academic writing a less taxing enterprise for novice and experienced researchers alike.