Sonny Software

I am a Mellel user and looking for a reference manager. Mellel supports both. Sente seems easier to use at first glance. So could you please tell me what are the advantages of Bookends?

Reiner wrote:I am a Mellel user and looking for a reference manager. Mellel supports both. Sente seems easier to use at first glance. So could you please tell me what are the advantages of Bookends?

Why don't you give them both a try and see which one fits your workflow the best? There are demos of bot appplications available. I really think that is the best way to find out. Personally, I liked the sleek look of Sente, but Bookends is a much more mature product with more of the features I needed. It may not be ass pretty but I find the interface well thought and easy to work with (and it has excellent support too).

But really, you should download the demos and try them for yourself!

I agree with niklas - Sente is a slick little package and many users with rather basic manuscript/bibliography needs may find it suits them fine. It's roots are much more in searching, organizing, and synthesizing huge bodies of literature from online sources (a task faced by health/med scientists, molecular biologists, etc., but generally not by those of us in smaller, more specialist scientific disciplines). Sente's functionality in this respect seems excellent. As a bibliography builder with flexibility for formatting, though, Bookends is far more feature-rich. Sente, all else aside, has a very small number of fields available, just the basics, and lacks a lot of the sophisticated bibliography formating seen in programs like Bookends (and Endnote). If you depend on lengthy sets of very specific keywords, Sente also has a much different paradigm (its keywords are clearly set up to distill large bodies of literature in useful and flexible ways) than Bookends/Endnote. Still, depends on your needs and focus. For serious database database work and full control over writing academic papers, Bookends is in my opinion the way to go.

If you are using Mellel, pardon my french, but you'd be a fool to use anything but Bookends. The functionality between the two cannot be beat. There is some discussion about this question on the Mellel forum, and Bookends won that thread too

I agree with Niklas and Jonathan. Those who work in the field of sciences could perhaps choose Sente too, but for those working in the humanities Bookends seems definitely the better choice.

My field is history, and when a couple of months ago I had to switch from the dicontinued ProCite I extensively tested Endnote, Bookends and Sente to see which of them best suited my purposes. At that time, Bookends was still at version 7.7.5, which was much more limited than the current 8, but even then it won the contest easily, even before I started using Mellel as my default word processor.

All German speakers of you are invited to partiticipate in the new comparison between Bookends and Sente (and possibly other reference managers) under http://apfelwiki.de/wiki/Tests/Literatu ... nterMacOSX

I have been using Bookend for more than one year now, and I have to say that I'm more and more thankful for this priceless tool.

Once in a while I have been downloading Endnote just to see if they can compete or not, but I always get the same result. Bookend beats them all the time (as far as I am concerned).

I have done the same with the new competitor Sente, and I have to say that Sente is a good runner-up, but it may be that the saying "it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks" is true here. But I still think that Bookend have the advantage if you compare Sente and Bookend. Endnote is still left behind both the others.

So far I have not considered to replace Bookend with neither Sente nor Endnote and I do not think it will happen in years to come. Especially since the support from and the development by Sonny Software (through Jon) is outstanding (IMHO)!