OT-Replacement for Papers from Mekentosj

Posted by jamesofford
Oct 29, 2014 at 10:37 AM

Good morning:
I realize that this is off-topic in that it is not about outliners or general purpose information managers, but this group has a wide experience, and I can’t really imagine any other place where the expertise to answer my question could live.

I am an academic, working in biological science at a Big Midwestern University. As an academic, my writing world consists of grants, research articles, and review articles. All of these require bibliographies, and I also maintain a large set of pdfs on my computer so that I can write and cite. In the old days, when I was in graduate school(My first computer was an IBM with two 5 1/4 floppies-I’m that old.)most of the time I schlepped over to the library, searched through paper indexes(indices?), copied the papers that I needed, and then had to enter each of them by hand to cite them. Now, in the 21st century I can search and download the pdf from my computer, and maintain my own library of pdfs for use in my writing. The creation of bibliographies is also now coming into the 21st century and there are several different programs that you can use to do your bibliography management, especially on the mac.

Endnotes was the first, and is still the most popular choice, but I don’t really like it much. It does bibliographies, but doesn’t do a good job of managing the pdfs.

For some time I have used Papers from Mekentosh(http://www.papersapp.com/). I started with version 1, and have upgraded each time an upgrade became available. Version 1 was okay, version 2 was a big upgrade, and it has worked well for me. It does everything that you need in a bibliography manager. You can search from within the program, import pdfs, the program searches out the title, author and other metadata and populates the appropriate fields. It can then help you build the bibliography in your word processor(at least in Word), and formats the bibliography for your submission. I am up to version 2.7, and it works great.

Things have gotten less rosy with version 3. There are lots of bugs, and many things that version 2.X did well, version 3 does poorly. I have had several interactions with their customer service people, and I am still not happy.

I have several big writing projects coming up including a couple of grants, a couple of papers and a review. Before I get started I thought that I would check around and try to find a new program.

I have looked at, and don’t really like Zotero and Mendeley. I prefer to have my stuff locally. I often turn off the internet when I am writing to keep distractions to a minimum so I need something that works locally.

On the mac, there are several programs that do what I want them to do. Papers, Sente(http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/Sente.html), and bookends(http://www.sonnysoftware.com/). I am thinking of moving over to one of those two.

My question-Do any of you have experience with either of these two programs? Can you point me to a good review of either, and/or a good comparison of the different programs?

My apologies for such a long post, and thanks for taking the time to read.

Jim.