MacResearch

I'm using BibDesk
Excellent if you are on LaTeX...

Sorry to revive an old thread, but I need to ask:

Do you have any problems using iPapers? I sometimes get pdfs with the wrong name (i.e. associated with another PubMed ID), and I am not sure how results are sorted after a PubMed search. Clicking on headers ('author', 'year', etc) does not have consistent results.

I just lost my way through a large search -- and that could mean two days work.

Thanks!

Hi Tjowens,

yes, I am using Zotero for two weeks now. It's not fully functional yet, but it is an awsome tool which makes managing electronic sources much easier!

What I like about it:
When I find something interesting on the web (a web page or a pdf file), I just save it to Zotero and Zotero stores also the weblink, the date when I opened the website and Metadata it can retrieve from the website as well as a snapshot of the current page (without linked pages, for sure - that's the only drawback if I dare talking about drawbacks at all).

And you can add several text notes to each item, create links between items, create "stand alone" text notes, organize your notes and references with tags and in folders .. it's amazing and its FREE!

So at the moment I can't imagine to manage all my references with Zotero, but it lives in my Firefox (on the PC at work and on my PowerBook at home or anywhere ;-)) and I don't want to be without it any more. :-)

Just try it out - it's a great tool with a very high potential!
It is platform independent (requires Firefox 2) and it is free.
-> http://www.zotero.org

There are several ways to export the reference Data (BibTeX, RIS, HTML, ...) and I recommend it to anyone (already convinced a colleague to try it and he also was very enthusiastic about it - it is a bookmark and reference manager in one app.

For my "paper" and PDF-References, I'm working with JabRef (http://jabref.sourceforge.net), as it is platform independent and I can use it on Windows and MacOS X.
(I would like BibDesk, but as it is mac-only, I'm staying with JabRef at this time. I'll try to see if I can work on the JabRef-*.bib-file with BibDesk without any problems.)

The only thing I'm using EndNote for (as I have a licence here at work) is searching for references in the ISI Web of Knowledge and exporting them to RIS for using them in my rapidly growing JabRef-Database. :-)

Kind regards

Martin

Now we have "Papers" from Mekentosj: http://mekentosj.com/papers/

I tried endnote Xml import, works well !

C.

I'm currently using Bibdesk, but after reading your post I downloaded the Papers preview. While I also think that this program is promising, I do not see me changing from bibdesk to papers anytime soon (well, not until the official release, at least!). Both the "journals" and "author" windows are broken. Also, the bib import does not seem to support the local-url field used in bibdesk so the .pdf files are not automatically imported with the library...

On another topic, I was wondering why programs like papers, iPapers, seem to integrate only pubmed support and not some other online databases (isi web of knowledge, for example). As coverage for physical sciences in pubmed is *very* limited, this makes these programs less "useful" outside the medicine/biology community..

If you use LaTeX then Bibdesk is all you'll ever need. It's simple, light but yet powerful. It handles importing references from several online databases including web of science. I tried Papers, but I think it's still a little buggy and really bloated if all you need is a reference DB. In my case, I don't really care having an included PDF reader, you already have Preview for that. In Bibdesk you can still include notes and links and the nice thing is that your database is a `simple' .bib file. The main disadvantage of Bibdesk is that it doesn't work with MS Word as Endnote does. This is a disadvantage or a wonderful opportunity to start using LaTeX! Lastly, Bibdesk is free and Open Source, you can't beat that.

Wikindx is a web application using PHP and MySQL. It is designed for single or multi-user reference management, with import/export support for BibTeX and EndNote XML.

It is realeased under the GPL.

It just installed it two days ago, but I wasn't able to import my EndNote files.

If you would like to use Apple's Pages (v. 3) as an editor, which I recommend, CiteInPages is a collection of two Applescripts and a few templates to allow BibDesk to insert and format in-text citations and bibliographies in Pages, yielding functionality similar to EndNote. A weakness right now is a lack of pre-built bibliography format templates for specific journals, though BibDesk includes a graphical template editor so you can build your own. CiteInPages comes with a basic template now, and I hope to have an full AMA bibliography style template complete soon. Both BibDesk and CiteInPages are available open source at no cost. See http://jhh.med.virginia.edu/main/CiteInPages

Whilst DevonThink can be used to store pdfs of references it is actually a one-stop shop for storing information from a wide range of digital sources, instrument data, emails, graphs, papers. photos, presentations, web pages, notes, laboratory journals, tables, schemes, pictures etc.
These can then be sorted, grouped, searches, annotated, filtered etc. It also has great Applescript support.

However it does not have the sort of tools you might want for adding references to publications.

There is a review here http://www.macresearch.org/devonthink_pro

I am using Sonnysoftware's Bookends together with the Redlers' Mellel. The integrate beautifully and are much cheaper and way more elegant than the traditional MS Word / EndNotes combo. Getting away from Word alone is worth it...

-- marcocoa

Sorry, never tried to convert Word files. I just started writing new manuscripts in Mellel. But doesnt Mellel allow you to automatically convert {}, [] or () enclosed terms to citations? Not sure, never tried really... Sorry!

-- marcocoa