Sonny Software

Dear Forum -

I'm a reformed EndNote user trying out bookends. In EndNote, I used one of the user-defined fields to assign each reference a topic, so I could remember why that reference was in the database and find subsets of related articles quickly.

Some of my "topics" have a fixed membership, e.g. "cited in Thesis", and some expand through time, e.g. "Simulation Models". Each reference can have more than one topic.

Clearly what I really want is to create groups of references, which bookends does. My question is: what are the tradeoffs in using static groups vs. smart groups?

The only thing I can think of is that if I used smart groups, I'd still need a custom label field (my citations usually come with keywords that the authors have selected and I don't like mucking that up with my own labels). Are there other factors I should consider?

Hi,

Smart groups are useful because they automatically add relevant references to the list. If you have to tag them, it makes the smart groups a bit less useful (to me, anyway). But useful nonetheless. Note that if you are using keywords, the keywords Term List offers something that might suffice -- clicking on a term will show all the references that contain it. Clicking on multiple terms will AND them (by default) so you can see references that contain all the keywords (you can change this to an OR in Term List action menu, BTW).

If you don't want to tag references, you can assign them to static groups on the fly (and there are some handy keyboard shortcuts to do this very quickly).

BTW, in Bookends now you can actually have smart groups fetch references that belong to static groups (and in the next update you'll be able to exclude references that belong to static groups).

I hope other people chime in here with their thoughts about how to use smart vs static groups.

Jon
Sonny Software

Jon wrote:Hi,

Smart groups are useful because they automatically add relevant references to the list. If you have to tag them, it makes the smart groups a bit less useful (to me, anyway). But useful nonetheless. Note that if you are using keywords, the keywords Term List offers something that might suffice -- clicking on a term will show all the references that contain it. Clicking on multiple terms will AND them (by default) so you can see references that contain all the keywords (you can change this to an OR in Term List action menu, BTW).

If you don't want to tag references, you can assign them to static groups on the fly (and there are some handy keyboard shortcuts to do this very quickly).

BTW, in Bookends now you can actually have smart groups fetch references that belong to static groups (and in the next update you'll be able to exclude references that belong to static groups).

I hope other people chime in here with their thoughts about how to use smart vs static groups.

Jon
Sonny Software

I like tagging, and so I was hoping to use more smart groups and fewer static groups. But I also like to have a smart group that shows all references that do not belong to any other group, so I can easily spot orphaned items. When I set up that smart group, I realized that it didn't count membership in a smart group, and so was displaying all items that weren't in static groups. Any way that feature could be tweaked? Or some way I could fix the setting so the membership in other smart groups is recognized?

As you saw, Bookends let's you find references that do or don't belong to certain static groups, but it doesn't search smart groups (which of course are not stored but are generated dynamically). The only way to see if a reference does or doesn't belong to a smart group is the Option-Shift feature we discussed in another thread.

Jon
Sonny Software

Jon wrote: BTW, in Bookends now you can actually have smart groups fetch references that belong to static groups (and in the next update you'll be able to exclude references that belong to static groups).

That's a very welcome addition, thanks!