Endnote, Bookends, Sente, Zotero, oh my

On Jan 10, 2008, at 5:11 AM, <tidbits-talktidbits.com> <tidbits-talktidbits.com
 > wrote:

> Endnote, Bookends, Sente, Zotero, oh my


I started with Endnote and had the same issues. I've since switched
to Bookends and found it excellent. The developer is very responsive,
the software works well and effectively, and has lots of different
useful features. I do value the library search feature more, however,
and I am in the humanities, so our needs may be different.

cheers,
David Silbey

David Silbey History Alvernia College
silbeysilbey.net

Hello Cheryl,

You are right about how differently people respond to bibliographic
database programs.

I used Endnote up to 6 or so years ago, got tired of the upgrade/
support issue thing, and searched and found Bookends. It has gone
through many changes, going into OSX, and I recommend it highly. I'm
in the arts/art training and BE fits all my bib and citation needs
very well. The online search capability is terrific as I can search
our university library from within BE and download possible items.
Numerous aspects make BE very useful: configurable data fields, a
logical layout that can be simplified if needed, fast performance ( I
have over 1200 refs in my current database) doing searches, and my
experience with the developer is excellent. He has always responded to
my questions quite quickly. Bookends also works well with Nisus Writer
Pro which I use for my final writing (after Scrivener for the drafts).

I'm obviously a satisfied user. I believe you'll find on the BE forum
that there are users with databases equal and greater than yours.
Maybe check out what is happening there.

Good luck,
Craig Turner

I share lots of users' experience with EndNote, I quit using it at version 6. Bookends works fine, I have a database of about 4300 records. I use Mellel for word processing (www.mellel.com), it is designed for academic writers, and it is well integrated with Bookends. It does not lose its links even if you exchange the text files with Word users. If you receive lots of student papers with graphics and all, Pages reads these files better than Mellel. There is a special offer for Mellel with Bookends, I think it is less than the EndNote upgrade. - good luck, arent greve

I have had bad experience with Endnote as well. For a software that has been around for so long, it's just difficult to use. Period.

Now I am using WizFolio Web 2.0. It's a little like Zotero, in that it has a three panel viewing structure, so it's also pretty simple to navigate. But what is different is that it is web-based, so I could access my collections from different terminals in school. And the best thing is that it's free!

What I like about it is that I can organise my reference collection drag-and-drop items into folders, just like my normal windows media player. So it did not take long to pick up.

I did not have much problems switching to WizFolio at the start. But if you have large existing collections, it is not too much effort to import it in as well. WizFolio allows you to import .RIS files from your Endnote or Zotero collections.

The only problem for now is that WizFolio is optimised to search only PubMed, so life science researchers would be more happy to use it. But in it's latest release, it has also included a function whereby I could import citations directly from webpages of Scopus. So I think in time to come, more provisions will be made for other academic disciplines.

So far it's been pretty good.

see www.wizfolio.com

Both Sente and Bookends now have pretty impressive functions for downloading PDFs for the references in your database, and also for matching up the PDFs that you already have with references. Sente is slicker and more modern-looking (and written in Cocoa, I assume), but I can't vouch for it with confidence as I'm still evaluating it. I've used Bookends for a number of years and my database also has about 2000 entries. No slowness or anything; it just looks a wee bit old-fashioned.

Both programs boast good integration with a range of sound OS X word-processors. It's my impression that in the last year or so both companies have become a lot more conscious of each other, and are continually leapfrogging each other for functionality. So I expect them to continue to draw further and further ahead of EndNote. I'm pretty sure Bookends is the clear winner on price.

I've tried a number of online services, and CiteULike is, in my view, the best one. You can make your references private if you wish (though public is the default) and you can set up research groups (or join existing ones) to share references with specific people. It has bookmarklets for most browsers, which work with scrapers to pull in citation data from ScienceDirect, Springer Link, Oxford Journals, Cambridge Journals, Amazon, etc. The developers are very quick to respond to requests/queries. You can export BibTeX or RIS data for your whole library or subsets thereof to import into Bookends/Sente. It can also show references in APA, MLA, and other well-known citation formats. My workflow is generally to capture things I find online in CiteULike and gradually export them to Bookends. Note that CiteULike is free.

It would be great if a long-time, or at least regular, Sente user could contribute, to let us know about advantages/problems with the program.

I'm a long-time Sente user, and based on previous discussions on TidBITS Talk, I suspect a number of us will chime in here.

Sente has been great for quite a while, and the most recent major update resolved my only remaining complaints. Now the program finds citations easily, re-names and stores PDF files in a user-defined way, and works beautifully with keywords and filters. The new version has an integrated web browser, which makes jumping through authentication hoops easy, and makes downloading PDFs from the web straightforward. A new Quick Find feature means that when a colleague emails me a PDF, I simply drop it into Sente and the program automatically finds the full reference information from PubMed, links in the PDF and manages the file naming and storage. Bibliographies are perfect, I use Mellel which has tight integration with Sente, but Word and BibTex are also well integrated.

Sente may cost more than competitors, I'm unsure. Since research is central to my work, and since I get academic pricing, the cost wasn't really an issue. Sente's developers are very active and engaged on the Sente forums, and updates are regular and targeted -- this is worth a lot.

The one area that could be improved is the search dialog for PubMed searching. It's a bit fiddly, and search results are displayed in a saved search library rather than in a temporary separate window. This has pros and cons, and once you're used to it is a minor issue at most.

Sente doesn't have facilities for reading PDFs within the program (in opens them in Preview), and the note-taking facilities are very basic -- a text field into which you enter notes. But for finding references and managing a PDF library, I think it's the best program available.

On 17/07/2008 11:58 PM, "Ashish Ranpura" <buddhaheadranpura.com> spake
thus:

> Bibliographies are perfect, I use Mellel which has tight integration with
> Sente, but Word and BibTex are also well integrated.

Hm. I just tried the demo yesterday and I'm less than impressed with it's
BibTeX import. I imported my nearly 1200-entry reference list, and there's a
whole bunch with various errors such as blank titles, incorrect publication
types (e.g., conference proceedings being categorised as journal articles),
etc. BibTeX import should be easy and is something that I would expect
commercial software to get right. It's also something I need as a lot of my
references come in BibTeX form.

Sente looks like a very nice program that I might consider using, but I
don't have time to do major cleanup work after import. Maybe I'll have a
chat to the developers about it.

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://xri.net/=nigel.stanger

Nigel,

Please do submit your BibTeX file to us (Third Street Software, the maker of Sente) along with any notes about particular references that you think were mishandled. We always investigate reports like this to see if there are problem in the Sente importer. Please use our support at thirdstreetsoftware dot com address.

Michael