The program presents the user with a window containing a dropdown menu from which to select the type of reference they require (e.g., book, congressional legislation, film, newspaper article, etc.

EndNote can be installed so that its features, like Cite While You Write, appear in the Tools menu of Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org Writer.

It is also possible to save a single image, document, Excel spreadsheet, or other file type to each reference in an EndNote library.

[3] EndNote Version 1 was released as a ”Reference Database and Bibliography Maker” for Apple Macintosh in c. 1989 by Niles & Associates near Emeryville at a list price of US $129 plus shipping.

In the early 1990s, software reviewers stated, that “EndNote is a citation manager, not a personal online catalog.

Its focus is on inserting citations into written documents,” although it has had the “ability to import formatted references from other databases” from its very early days.

[13] In 2000 EndNote was acquired by Institute for Scientific Information’s (ISI) Research Soft Division, part of Thomson Corporation.

In September 2008, Thomson Reuters, the owners of EndNote, sued the Commonwealth of Virginia for US$10 million and requested an injunction against competing reference management software.

[17][18] George Mason University's Center for History and New Media had developed Zotero, a free/open-source extension to Mozilla Firefox.

"[19] The journal Nature editorialized that "the virtues of interoperability and easy data-sharing among researchers are worth restating.