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EndNote: Exporting from EndNote to Zotero

Nursing, Health Professions, and Data Services Librarian

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Joel Glogowski
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Exporting from EndNote to Zotero

Create an RIS text file from EndNote: 

  • Open EndNote 
  • Edit - Select All
  • File - Export 
  • Save as type: Text File (*.txt) 
  • Output style: RefMan (RIS) Export 

Open the (RIS) text file in notepad to do the find and replace to point to “PDF” folder: 

  • The PDF location in the text file is in the “L1” field. The file location starts with “internal-pdf://” which is not an actual location. You need to replace that with the actual location of those PDFs on your computer. To do this, you can use the “Replace” tool (Edit - Replace) to replace “internal-pdf://” with “file://[the actual location of your EndNote PDFs]”. 
  • EndNote puts attached PDFs in the library’s *.data folder. A sample folder path might look like this: file://C:/Users/jglogowski/Desktop/secondTestLibrary.Data/PDF/ 
  • NOTE: If you copy and paste the file path from Windows, the slashes will be in the wrong direction (\ instead of /) and the import won’t work. Make sure all the slashes look like this: /.
  • NOTE: EndNote puts every pdf in its own folder. Don’t include every sub folder. Just go as far as the “PDF” folder in the file path and be sure to end it with this kind of slash: /. 

Import to Zotero: 

  • Open Zotero 
  • File - Import 
  • Open EndNote text file. 
  • New folder/subcollection is created that contains References and PDFs.