‘Smart Groups’ make Bookends worth your time, money
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Apr 19, 2006 at 4:29am
Version 9.0.3 of Sonny Software’s Bookends, a Mac OS X only bibliography/reference and information management application for students and professionals, is the best version yet.
Already a fine reference tool, the update adds: color labels for references, the ability to assign Command key shortcuts for static groups, drag and drop import of PubMed references from a browser, drag and drop downloading and attachment of PDF files from a browser, and drag and drop attachment of a PDF from Preview or Acrobat Reader. You can also now assign the keyboard shortcut Command-V to Paste Plain Text. Other new features include: Global Change -> Restore Default Font, improved Action pop-up and contextual menus and the ability to enter multiple URLs.
My favorite feature of Bookends is “Smart Groups.” Bookends supports Static, Smart and Virtual groups. Static groups are collections of references whose contents don’t change unless you intentionally add or delete members. Smart groups are collections of references defined by search criteria. The members of a smart group may change whenever you add or remove references from the database. Virtual groups let you select multiple groups in the List View window at once (static, smart, and/or the Hits) and Bookends will display the references that are common to all groups (AND) or that are in any of the groups (OR).
Regarding the latter: imagine you’re doing a research project on Leopard (as in Mac OS X 10.5). Whenever you add a new citation you just add a keyword for “Leopard.” If you have a smart group for this keyword, the new citation will automatically appear in the list when you click on the group. Now take it a step further and pretend you’re writing an article on future Apple products such as the long-rumored “iPhone.” You can create a smart group for only those citations that have both the keywords “Leopard” and “iPhone.” And they’re dynamically updated, so they’re always current.
If you’re updating an older database and don’t have keywords assigned, it’s no biggie. Bookends offers batch operations that let you find and replace or insert data into multiple records at the same time (though you should back up before doing so).
If you have an iPod (and, these days, who hasn’t?) and want to take your references, including abstracts with you, Bookends 9.0.3 lets you do just that in an easy, relatively straight-forward manner.
Bookends is Unicode-savvy, which means you can mix Roman (English, French, German, etc.) and non-Roman (Japanese, Greek, Hebrew, etc.) characters. That can be very handy in some research projects.
Other Bookend features include: Internet Search and import; groups with Live Search; formatting references references for footnotes and bibliographies; and the ability to scan documents from Word or Mellel (though it works better with the latter than the former). With Bookends you can directly search for and import references from many online sources, including the Library of Congress, PubMed, Amazon, and hundreds of libraries from around the world.
You can search PubMed automatically in the background and have Bookends discover and notify you of publications of interest as soon as they appear.
What’s more, Bookends can act as an HTTP server. This means that it can receive and respond to requests from browsers over the Internet. You create Web pages with hypertext links or forms that let others, on any computer platform, link to or search for references in your databases. Sonny Software provides templates and step-by-step instructions. But if you don’t a beefy Internet connection, don’t even try it.
Bookends can import XML files exported from EndNote 7 or 8, and export XML files in the EndNote 7 schema, making it possible to exchange reference data with EndNote libraries and preserve styled text settings (including superscript/subscript).
A free evaluation copy of Bookends can be downloaded from the Sonny Software web site. All features are enabled in the evaluation copy except that databases are limited to a maximum of 50 references. Once purchased for US$99 ($69 for students), Sonny Software will supply a registration number that will unlock the evaluation version and remove this restriction. Version 9.0.3 is a free update for anyone who bought Bookends on or after Nov. 1, 2004. There are also special discounts for those who are switching from EndNote or other reference management products, and for registered users of Mellel. Group discounts and site licenses are also available.
System requirements: Mac OS X 10.2 or later.
Macsimum rating: 8 out of 10.
By the way, after we finished this review, Sonny Software released version 9.0.4 of Bookends, which offers automatic verify and backup, as well as other new features.
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
