As a loyal EndNote user since it was owned by Niles I have seen many improvements in this product and survived their near disasterous port to OS X. EndNote 9 works just fine and is very stable.

I have used X now for about a week. It provides minor improvements to the interface. Most notable is the ability to drag and drop pdfs onto a record. This means that all of your records will be directly and easily linked to your pdfs. However, this feature is incomplete.

A. Although you can see an icon of the pdf when you open your record, you cannot drag and drop it anyplace -- you can only open it. This means that to send it to a friend via email that you must open the pdf or find the endnote pdf directory via the Finder.

B. When you drop a pdf onto a record, EN creates a new version of that pdf. I have about 500 pdfs organized in a library file on my desktop by first author. When I linked pdfs to EN records the old way, their storage directory was organized and accessible. For the new way EN creates a fairly flat file structure -- it is organized alphabetically by first author, but that is about it.

C. It seems to be the case that for old records with hyperlinks to pdfs stored in my library that I get a pdf icon that connects to the pdf in my old directory. However, once I have more "new" versions of links (where the pdfs are duplicated and put into their own EN directory) it will be very hard to know where to go to drag and drop a stored PDF. (All icons have the same label.) I have a large harddrive but it seem pointless haviing multiple copies of the same file especially when 99% of these files are ones I have downloaded from online versions of journals.

Recommendation. I will go thru the transition with EN X and will pay my $99 for this minor upgrade. I will not buy multiple copies for my lab and grad students as I have with prior versions as these new features simply are not worth the price of a new release.

So I recommend EndNote 9 very highly. I recommned EndNote X if you have never used EN. But I do not recommend switching from EN 9 to EN X unless you have $99 burning a hole in your pocket.