Library Guides: EndNote: Organising references using groups

Organising your references using groups

Groups make it easy to break a large library into subsets for later viewing. A group simply points to a subset of references that already exist in the library.

Automatically generated groups include All References, Unfiled and Trash. Custom groups and smart groups are created by you to help organise your library. The left pane of the library window lists all the groups in the current library.

To create a new group

From the Groups menu, select Create Group or right-click in the Groups panel on the left-hand side of the screen and select Create Group
The new group is displayed in the left panel with the name New Group highlighted, rename the group by typing in the new name

To add references to a group

Highlight the reference(s) and use one of the following options:
- Use the mouse to drag and drop the reference(s) to the desired group
- Move the mouse over the highlighted reference(s), right click and select Add References To, then select the desired group name
- From the Groups menu, select Add References To, then select the desired group name

A smart group is a custom group that contains a search strategy. Any reference that is added or modified that matches the search strategy will automatically be added to the smart group. To create a new smart group:

From the Groups menu, select Create Smart Group or right-click in the Groups pane on the left-hand side of the screen and select the option Create Smart Group
Give it a name and enter the search strategy for your group and click on Create
The new group is displayed in the left pane

You can combine custom and smart groups together using AND, OR and NOT search operators to create new, useful combined group sets. Save references in custom and smart groups, and then save these sets of groups as a combined group set. To create a ‘Group from groups’ or combination group:

From the Groups menu, choose Create from Groups
Enter a name for the combination group
In the fields under the Include References heading, select up to 10 custom and / or smart groups to use as your search criteria
Use AND, OR, NOT to include or exclude references from custom and/or smart groups in your combined group set

You can organise your references by creating Group Sets. These can contain any combination of custom groups and smart groups. To create a group set

From the Groups menu, select Create Group Set or right-click in the Groups pane on the left hand side of the screen and select the option Create Group Set.
The new group set is displayed in the left pane with the name New Group Set highlighted. Rename the group by typing in the new name. You can drag groups to move them from other group sets to the new group set, or you can create new custom groups, smart groups and combination groups under the new heading.