Importing references in XML format from REHABDATA into EndNote

REHABDATA by NARIC is perhaps not top of the databases you’d consider essential to use for a literature search for most topics, but if you are using it (or indeed any other database that only exports in XML), how can you get your results into EndNote?

The following process I’ve come up with is based primarily on this helpful video’s process for converting XML files into an EndNote-friendly tab-delimited format.

Save your results from REHABDATA in XML format.

Open the file in Excel.

Edit the column headings to exactly match the EndNote fields you want the data to go into, and delete all unnecessary columns. So, for example, I’d suggest ending up with: Author, Title, Journal, Year, Volume, Issue, Pages, Abstract, Keywords, ISSN for journal articles.

If you’ve got book results, you’d probably want to cut and paste these out into a new Excel sheet, change the column headings to ones relevant to ‘Book’ reference type and repeat the process with a separate file.

Save the tidied up table as a Text (tab delimited) (*.txt) document.

Open this in Word.

Put the cursor at the start of the document, press return to get a blank line, and type:

*Journal article

(including the asterisk at the start)

Run a Find and Replace (Ctrl-H), for:

Find: | (vertical line – usually shift \ on UK keyboards)

Replace with: // (two forward-slashes)

Replace all

Find: (double-quote-mark symbol – usually shift 2 on UK keyboards)

Replace with: (nothing! leave blank)

Replace all

Save (as text file)

In EndNote, go to File > Import > File

Choose the edited text file.

Select Tab Delimited as the Import Option.

Go!

Success!

If you get an error saying you’ve got the wrong field names, this will be because one or more of your headings you were editing in Excel are not the correct exact wording of a corresponding field name in EndNote. Try again!

You may find some older results appear with all the journal details crammed in the title field. Unfortunately, that’s just how the data comes out of REHABDATA. Obviously you could do some cunning find/replaces (in Excel or Word or EndNote), but that’s not really part of the import process; I’ll leave that to you to work out if you have sufficient results of that format to warrant it!