Sente6.7.11

EndNote has driven me slightly crazy for the last few years, so I don't really use it any more, but it's cite-while-you-write feature is still more powerful than anything else. Bookends and Sente... Both are excellent programs for managing your pdfs, maintaining a reference library, and generating bibliographies on demand. I've used both very extensively, including current versions and previous versions of Bookends and Sente. Details below... Stability: - Both are very stable programs, and don't crash (unlike EndNote, unless X3 has dramatically improved). They play very nicely with loads of word processors and are very reliable. Searching: - Sente: it's built-in browser uses webkit, i.e. it's basically Safari. You can do standard web searches from within Sente. I like the 'targeted browsing' feature, which quickly shows you what you and don't have in your library already when you do pubmed search. - Bookends has a straightforward PubMed/other site searching window that works very well. It doesn't look like a standard browser page, but obviously does the same thing. Refs already in your library are highlighted in yellow in PubMed windows. It is very good at finding and loading pdfs. Updating incomplete refs: Bookends has a really nice host of tools to update refs. If you have a ref that got loaded in when it was online only, it's quick and easy to use a Bookends menu command to update the reference. There are a couple of ways of doing this, and it works well. Sente is supposed to do some auto-updating, but it doesn't seem to work nearly as well. I really like this handy feature. Speed: On a very large library (7,500 refs), Bookends is noticeably quicker at start-up (about 10 seconds quicker). Searches within the library are faster, and happen live as you type in the Spotlight window in the library. This is more responsive. Pdfs: Both allow you to quickly see your attached pdfs within the main window, open them into a standalone reader, etc. Sente supports pdf comments etc. Custom fields: Both allow you make and view notes etc very easily. Sending to colleagues: Bookends 'email ref' works reliably and attaches any pdfs to your email. Helpful for finding and sending stuff to colleagues. Technical support: Both Sente and Bookends offer good technical support, but Bookends is the best. Jon provides tech support, and is incredibly helpful. It's not that Sente is bad in any way, just that Jon and Bookends is superb. Working with Apple Pages: Both scan open Pages documents. Sente has a re-scan option that they are cautious about recommending. Haven't tried it myself - I use Pages all the time, but don't rescan a formatted doc, I always go back to the unformatted doc to edit. Working with Word: Both support scanning and rescanning with Word. I don't currently use them with Word, but have successfully used Bookends with Word in the past. You don't get the live formatting you see with EndNote cite-while-you-write, but this is no bad thing given the number of times it's caused hangs and crashes in my previous experience. Import/Export: I have a large Sente library which doesn't export the attachments absolutely reliably and puts them in the URL field rather than the attachments field. Bookends gets this right, and therefore it's easier to move a library out to EndNote from Bookends. Both import an EndNote library without problems. User help/ configuration of export filters etc. Online for Sente, a very thorough manual for Bookends. Formatting controls work fine on both. OVERALL: (If anyone cares) I used Bookends extensively, then switched to Sente when it was the first to be able to scan open Pages files. Bookends has now been doing this for a while. It's a bit quicker, and plays more nicely with EndNote (at least as things stand now). Reference updating is a bit easier. I slightly prefer the Sente online search (linking to the PubMed webpage), and Sente is very very slightly prettier, but the speed and other features of Bookends win out. Both are excellent, but I'm going to stick with Bookends.

Sente no longer recognises references on Google Scholar. No response to my email to support. I really regret Sente's demise, and the app having become abandonware. Once again, if only the developers would communicate to their (loyal) customers what is going on.

I migrated to Bookends from Sente, with considerable regret. Sente is far superior to Bookends and Papers 3 for doing online research. Indeed I continue to use it for this purpose and then import the references to Bookends. Sente puts online search results into Sente's own internal database. This allows one to interrogate large found data sets in far more detail than other apps allow. It also allows for automatic updates to search results based on any number of variables. Bookends and Papers merely display the results found in PubMed, etc. They are not downloaded into a database. So one cannot even do further searches, to narrow down the found data set, without re-running the entire search again. Sente can. This makes further ad hoc analyses of the found data set extremely quick and easy. I do hope Sente can come to life with a successful business model ...

Beware before investing time, energy and money in Sente.

It’s a great piece of software but seems on track to become abandonware. The last update to both the Mac and iOS apps has been at least a year ago. A coming update will only ensure that the app keeps functioning with El Capitan. In the past months the support site has been all but ignored by the TSS team. User requests are ignored as a matter of policy. Several threads have been launched in recent months by worried users inquiring what the future of Sente looks like. These questions have been ignored and met with deafening silence, as have personal emails.

Meanwhile Sente’s main competitor Bookends has released an update recently with vastly improved import from Sente, a clear sign. To be clear: I own Sente as well as Bookends and actually switched to Sente over a year ago because of its Quicktags system, ability to nest smart groups into smart groups, and overall better GUI. I have invested a lot of time in transitioning from Bookends to Sente and my academic workflow is very much built around it. I also rely heavily on the iPad app which is also great. I can understand temporary silences and I am willing to give a lot of credit to developers if the app is worth it. But the company's current disdain for its customers suggests the end of the app might be in sight.

I purchased a Sente 6 license and installed it under Mavericks, following directions. All attempts to add the registration number failed with an odd error ('signature failed'). Part of this was my fault (I used the wrong email address), but I followed directions to fix this. Still no success. The support person then made a series of suggestions, all of which failed. I supplied the logs he requested and detailed reports on what I had tried. After two days of trying to sort this out, he simply stopped responding to my inquiries. After four days, when I was still unable to register and got no response despite multiple politely worded requests for help, I wrote a more firmly worded message saying basically that I required some kind of reply, and if I didn't get one, I would be compelled to file a complaint. I got an answer back almost immediately saying: No need to file a complaint, I have issued a refund you should see within a day or two. They would have saved me a lot of trouble if they had just admitted that they didn't know how to fix the problem. It's great software, but I was very unhappy with this unprofessional and rude treatment by support. And I still haven't seen the refund.

I decided that I need to write some positive reviews on MU of the software I use most often and Sente is a good candidate because I have it open almost every day. Why? Because all of my references are there! But far more informative are my reasons for using the application. Like any hopelessly disorganized grad student, as comprehensive exams loomed ever closer, I decided I needed some applications to do some digital organizing for me, particularly one to keep track of my references. References when you're an undergrad are a doddle. Pull up a giant stack of books and dutifully type out your references in alphabetical order! At least that's what I did. But grad work is long and complex. So, as I churned out little papers for my last semester or two of classes, I started testing out these reference managers. I started with Endnote because I asked for advice and it seems to be the only program IT departments have ever heard of. Endnote was very "wasn't." If it wasn't crashing, it wasn't generating references as it should have. I am forced, against my will and better judgement, to use MLA (the despiser of footnotes and jewel of the wordy) and Endnote was still using MLA formatting from the late eighties (or something). In fact, I found this to be the case with Bookmarks too. Can you imagine how annoying it is to go through your bibliography and type "print," "web," etc. at the end of every reference of a (rather overambitious) 140 reference paper? If you can, perhaps you've used these apps before. I knew something better had to be out there somewhere. After days of extensive searching on Google, I finally typed in "reference manager mac" and discovered Sente. Sente imported all my references from the other programs and, when I asked it to generate a bibliography, it actually added those irritating "print" and "web" tags. It struggled a bit with journal articles, but reference formatting is fully and easily editable so just a wee bit of tinkering and the app was back on track. That was enough to convince me. So for years I've been storing my references on Sente. And in that time, the developers have added lots of features that I never use. I'm sure they're great for someone looking to start anew, but if, like me, you'd been using other programs, you probably aren't too interested. For instance, you can now add pdf files to Sente and even tag them. Unfortunately, Sente doesn't use OpenMeta so my years of tagging in Yep! would be undone in Sente. Sente also has a cloud feature that I don't use. Maybe I've been avoiding my advisor in my log cabin in Montana too long, but I don't trust digital clouds. I'm certainly not going to store my beloved references in one! I'll just back everything up on my daisy-chained time machine. Even though I don't use these features, I still believe Sente is a great app. It works with Scrivener. It generates references. It stores enough references for the i-ching and the complete works of Confucius. It'll even look them up on various sites and build them automatically (although I strongly recommend a human review - Sente may think it's a Cyberman, but it is still being upgraded). Apologies.

Wow, I haven't used Sente recently, but I've just read through the changes to Sente and its cloud model, and a look through how careful and open the developers are on their blog. Very impressive, I always leaned towards Bookends, and suspect Bookends is still a more powerful reference manager (in terms of lower-level database management), but Sente has done a brilliant job of making it very tempting to new users!!!

Huh? 6.5.6 is the current version.

have the exact same comment as Couseypike below feature regarding update of incomplete reference that Sente lacks. This has resulted in many duplicated references in my library, which is really annoying. Updating incomplete refs: Bookends has a really nice host of tools to update refs. If you have a ref that got loaded in when it was online only, it's quick and easy to use a Bookends menu command to update the reference. There are a couple of ways of doing this, and it works well. Sente is supposed to do some auto-updating, but it doesn't seem to work nearly as well. I really like this handy feature. Another thing Sente need to improve is its note-taking feature. It always asks you to specify a location (sentence or paragraph) when you make note. But sometimes we need to make comments/note on the whole paper but not a specific paragraph or sentence.

Not impressed. I've spent the past three days trying to use the latest version of Sente and have found the experience incredibly frustrating. I have 100's of pdf files already on my computer that I need to get into a good ref. database manager. The error rate for Sente not recognizing a recently published journal article is quite high. In many cases, there is a viscous loop where the program seems to be jumping to PubMed and back to Google Scholar to find the article automatically. After several minutes of waiting for something to happen (hitting the cancel button does nothing), the search ends unsuccessfully, or I have to force quit the app. A quick search on PubMed or Google Scholar directly takes me right to the reference. When automatic importing and paper matching does work, there is a good 7-10 second lag for every paper, and this is running on a late 2009 MacPro loaded with ram. After digging into the user forums, it seems that there are serious problems with auto matching that have been unresolved for 4-6 months. The other major deficiency on the front end of this program is that it does not support EZproxy so I cannot directly import papers from journals while working at my university computer. Summary: I got so frustrated with trying to get things into this app. that I did not even make it to testing how well it handled scanning and making bibliographies.

EndNote has driven me slightly crazy for the last few years, so I don't really use it any more, but it's cite-while-you-write feature is still more powerful than anything else. Bookends and Sente... Both are excellent programs for managing your pdfs, maintaining a reference library, and generating bibliographies on demand. I've used both very extensively, including current versions and previous versions of Bookends and Sente. Details below... Stability: - Both are very stable programs, and don't crash (unlike EndNote, unless X3 has dramatically improved). They play very nicely with loads of word processors and are very reliable. Searching: - Sente: it's built-in browser uses webkit, i.e. it's basically Safari. You can do standard web searches from within Sente. I like the 'targeted browsing' feature, which quickly shows you what you and don't have in your library already when you do pubmed search. - Bookends has a straightforward PubMed/other site searching window that works very well. It doesn't look like a standard browser page, but obviously does the same thing. Refs already in your library are highlighted in yellow in PubMed windows. It is very good at finding and loading pdfs. Updating incomplete refs: Bookends has a really nice host of tools to update refs. If you have a ref that got loaded in when it was online only, it's quick and easy to use a Bookends menu command to update the reference. There are a couple of ways of doing this, and it works well. Sente is supposed to do some auto-updating, but it doesn't seem to work nearly as well. I really like this handy feature. Speed: On a very large library (7,500 refs), Bookends is noticeably quicker at start-up (about 10 seconds quicker). Searches within the library are faster, and happen live as you type in the Spotlight window in the library. This is more responsive. Pdfs: Both allow you to quickly see your attached pdfs within the main window, open them into a standalone reader, etc. Sente supports pdf comments etc. Custom fields: Both allow you make and view notes etc very easily. Sending to colleagues: Bookends 'email ref' works reliably and attaches any pdfs to your email. Helpful for finding and sending stuff to colleagues. Technical support: Both Sente and Bookends offer good technical support, but Bookends is the best. Jon provides tech support, and is incredibly helpful. It's not that Sente is bad in any way, just that Jon and Bookends is superb. Working with Apple Pages: Both scan open Pages documents. Sente has a re-scan option that they are cautious about recommending. Haven't tried it myself - I use Pages all the time, but don't rescan a formatted doc, I always go back to the unformatted doc to edit. Working with Word: Both support scanning and rescanning with Word. I don't currently use them with Word, but have successfully used Bookends with Word in the past. You don't get the live formatting you see with EndNote cite-while-you-write, but this is no bad thing given the number of times it's caused hangs and crashes in my previous experience. Import/Export: I have a large Sente library which doesn't export the attachments absolutely reliably and puts them in the URL field rather than the attachments field. Bookends gets this right, and therefore it's easier to move a library out to EndNote from Bookends. Both import an EndNote library without problems. User help/ configuration of export filters etc. Online for Sente, a very thorough manual for Bookends. Formatting controls work fine on both. OVERALL: (If anyone cares) I used Bookends extensively, then switched to Sente when it was the first to be able to scan open Pages files. Bookends has now been doing this for a while. It's a bit quicker, and plays more nicely with EndNote (at least as things stand now). Reference updating is a bit easier. I slightly prefer the Sente online search (linking to the PubMed webpage), and Sente is very very slightly prettier, but the speed and other features of Bookends win out. Both are excellent, but I'm going to stick with Bookends.

Another bug: when a local pdf file (downloaded by app other than Sente) is added to the library, it can only be read inside the Sente window but not by external app such as Acrobat. Nevertheless, pdf file download within the Sente can be opened either way.

Compared to Sente 5, I noticed a much higher CPU usage in Sente 6. Anybody else have similar experience?

I like it, took some time ti figure out how to use it, but it has all the features I need and it works great.

Without any doubt EndNote is still the best reference manager ever! You can share entire libraries between PCs and Macs, and this is essential for someone that works with both platforms, or when you collaborate with people that uses different OS. The integration of EndNote with Microsoft Word is great and now it can also work with Apple Pages. EndNote its ugly and it has a really bad GUI when comparing to Papers or Sente, but it works a lot better than those two together when you need to write a paper or a thesis. So do not even bother in buying Sente, it is expensive and it lacks the most essential feature on a reference manager the integration to Word and Pages...

I haven't explored all the features of Sente, but it seems to be head and shoulders above its competition. I spent the last few days looking at Sente, Papers, Zotero, and one programs that I didn't even bother to look at due to bad reviews (EndNote). For my needs, Sente is the best. I am trying to organize a couple of thousand pdfs (and a few other kinds of documents), and continue to research various areas from that base. Sente seems to have a strong emphasis on medical research (it uses PubMed as a default database to look for things, and I haven't figured out how to change that). But the tools of being able to look up bibliographic data automatically in Google Scholar, use keywords, and browse pdfs from within the program make the program exactly what I need. As of Feb 2009, the developers are giving some insight into the next version of the program, which looks to be a useful improvement. It will be a free upgrade to anyone who purchases the program after Jan 1, 2009.

If you are a student is affordable if you purchase a group license for 10 users and then split the costs!! Plus a lot of schools will reimburse you for half of the cost of the software.

It aims to be used in academia, but at US $89.95 it's to expensive to be used by students! So two thumbs down.

Although you get an initial generous 30 day trial period, after this has expired you can no longer assess future versions of the software! How can we test out new features if the developer won't allow us to trial the software again???

Sente's 5.4 upgrade takes it from amazing to phenomenal. This program (in version 4.x, if I recall) single-handedly converted me to a Mac. Nothing manages your searches, keeps you up to date on the literature, organizes your pdfs and other documents, AND functions as your citation manager. Sente does all that, and with the 5.4 upgrade you can now do your search, select a reference delivered by PubMed, and with one click, there's your imported, renamed, stored pdf. Sometimes you have to click twice. (If you're old enough to remember going to the library to photocopy an article, clicking twice is okay. Even if you're not that old, clicking twice is okay.) Just so you know going in, it's still only amazing if you work mostly in WoS; it's phenomenal properties are for PubMed. But "amazing" is still pretty good. I.e. on WoS you still have to go download the pdf through your own search, and then drag it onto the reference in your library to be automatically renamed, organized, and linked to the reference. This new release gives Sente many of the features that Papers has and Sente didn't. (Papers doesn't do the citation manager part, but it has some cool tricks that might have tempted you away from Sente. Now Sente has those cool tricks too.) It can sometimes be a little rough around the edges (I can't get the references to behave as reliably as in RefMan or EndNote), but the other features are so mind-bogglingly useful and easy that I don't mind doing a bit of tidying up.

This is now the golden standard of bibliography management programs: 1. Sente appears to have the cleanest, best-designed interface. For example, you can do *all* your work in the main library window - no need to open up a reference window, switch between tabs within that window, etc. 2. Sente is unique in that it doesn't force you to use arcane character codes and field names in order to produce working formats -- it's all done in a graphic interface, with popups and checkboxes.

No ability to format references in footnotes (despite "improved" functionality with Mellel? In that case, still no use in much of the humanities field. Sorry. But I'd love to know what's do very hard about the problem that we're on version 4 and still no progress.

Sente is great but ... Please, please, multilingual support !