With gathering all this information I needed someway to keep it organized. It was an uphill battle all the way, I might add. I’m not fabulous at documenting as I go. I figured that this was a problem that other people had before and I searched on VerstionTracker.com4 for the term bibliography in the Mac OS X section. EndNote is a large piece of software that many people use, but it is expensive at 239.00. 5 These are the alternatives I considered.
Bookends 7.7.5 / 8.0.4 and Reference Miner 1.2.5
http://www.sonnysoftware.com/
This is the one I’ve been using. As long as you have less than 50 references in your database, you don’t have to pay. That said, it is worth every the $99.00 ($69.00 academic) they charge for it. It can import records in a ton of formats, although I never did figure out how to do that effectively with data from the NYU Library database. It was much faster to use it’s companion, Reference Miner, to drag-and-drop sources into my database from Amazon.com or the Library of Congress. It allows you to keep track of lots of types of records and format them into many standard reference layouts. The version 7.7.5 exports didn’t let your grab the unique ID number that Bookends uses, but 8.0.4 fixes that. This helps because then you can use it as a unique ID in any other database you write.
Sente 2.0.2 (current: 2.2.0)
http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/index.cgi?page=sente&ref=vt
Sente bills itself as the “iTunes for academic literature“ and it is a nice interface. The thing is it geared towards finding journal articles through a database hookup. I kept getting refused by the NYU database, though. Interesting, but not what I needed.
BibDesk 0.853 (current: 0.99.3)
http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/
This works mostly with something known as BibTex formats. An open source project, it was updated after I was looking at it and it seems vastly improved. The interface is clean and straightforward. Although the formatting options aren’t as robust as with Bookends, they do provide an RSS feed format that is a handy features for bloggers. They also don’t have any kind of easy auto-import from an external-internet source like Bookends does with Reference Miner. That said, when I went back to double check the information on VersionTracker.com on May 7, 2005 I found an entry for BibDesk Scripts v0.2.1 which lists an Amazon.com search and the ability to auto-add an entry for a webpage open in Safari.
ReferenceWorker 1.1
http://www.midnite-liteman.com/ReferenceWorker.php
This is a $8.95 shareware product that hasn’t been updated since 2003. It has a clean interface and a nice feature set, but if it isn’t going to let me hack it or keep being updated otherwise, the other options seemed much more attractive.
Virtual Notecards 2.1
http://www.intelli-gents.com/
Part of me wishes that I had used this because it would have helped me keep notes organized, too. It is $99.00 ($59.00 academic). I had forgotten how much of a problem that could be. The interface is a bit overwhelming though, lots and lots of fields in every window. Also, it has no way to connect to online databases like Bookends did. I was also worried about my data being trapped once the 45 day trial expired if I hadn’t wanted to buy it.
YapBib 0.99r2
http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~jcorso/yapbib/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/yapbib
This seemed admirable, but, as frequentlly the case with unrated freeware, it seemed really raw and unstable. They are multi-platform, and plan to build in a lot of ability to annotate and take notes. The sourceforge.net project is new, and I wish them luck.