Leave a Review Bookends
Prompt Developer Response
I haven’t had the opportunity to test anything more than the developer correcting the appearance of the translator field for the MLA 8 citations, but that was promptly corrected after I noted it in my previous review. I appreciate and am genuinely surprised by the developer’s quick response. Thank you.Show lessLorring
It works!
It looks like a really useful program. I converted my Sente database on Mac to Bookends on Mac, then synced it to the iPad version. Once I had the programs set up and running, all the data moved over with no problems. The iPad version is basic - I wish it had the ability to open a web page and extract a reference from a site like Nature or Science, but it gets the job done!Show lessjwendolo2
Developer Response
Thank you for your review and feature request.Does not work
After shelling out an additional $20 in in-app purchases, the app still does not sync with Bookends for iCloud, making it useless. Yes, I've read the manual, and the forums. It doesn't work.ethelflaed
Best reference manager in my opinion
If you use Mac and iOS, I think this app is worth looking at. It works very well for me. The main advantage of Bookends over other apps like Papers or the seemingly abandonware Sente is that Bookends saves your PDF annotations like highlights and notes in the actual PDF. This means that if someday, you decide to stop using Bookends, you can take all of you PDFs to some other system/app and all of you annotations like highlights and notes will come with you because they exist in the actual PDFs. With Papers, Mendeley, Sente, and all other apps I have tried, the annotations are not actually stored in the PDF but in a app specific database and cannot be easily bulk exported. Good luck transferring from Papers to some other app and realizing that none of your highlights come along unless you individually export every single one of your possibly thousands of articles.
Another great advantage of Bookends is its iCloud sync of the files. It all just works.Show lessrpurrept
So far quite promising!
After a bit of difficulty getting the sync set up, I was able to get this set up, and so far it's worked remarkably well. Be aware that there are sample libraries when you bout to the program, so you may inadvertently add some of those references to your program. I've tried several similar programs and always lost annotations in the sync process (papers 3, mendeley) or had other problems (sente). It's been about a month since I started using this, and so far the sync had been seamless. The program itself is quick and intuitive once set up. I also very much appreciate the responsiveness of the developers to questions and problems. I would highly recommend this program. Definitely worth the small annual free to have the piece of mind.Show lessT dela P
Best bibliographic app available on any platform
Bookends is the only app that allows one to acquire, read and study, sort and collect, and actually use articles from scholarly journals while working with a manuscript on iOS.
It syncs flawlessly with the desktop version on macOS, so the markup, highlighting, and notes that you apply while reading on the iOS app transfers without any problems to the collection on macOS. To be clear, the article database and the attached pdf articles sync to iOS without any problem, and it uses iCloud and iCloud drive to do it. Further, it allows one to make citations of the collection/database of articles while working in a word processing app. So now you can do nearly all of what you need to do to write articles for publication. The only thing missing is the ability to scan the finished article to prepare the in-text citations and the final bibliography; that you need the desktop version for. But the temporary article citation markers are made in one tap after selecting an article, and the app can operate in split screen mode, so you get the whole deal on the screen while working.
I think that Bookends (the platform, iOS and macOS apps) are the best available bibliographic system available. I've invested in a site license for my laboratory. It beats Endnote by a big margin, especially since despite weeks of effort and time with technical support I've not been able to get Endnote to synch my macOS database to the web version of Endnote.
By the way, porting my Endnote reference database into Bookends (>3000 articles and 2000 attached pdfs) required only a few minutes on macOS and worked flawlessly. All the attachments were retained, and all of the accented and scientific markup (unicode Greek letters and mathematical symbols, superscripts and subscripts and bold/italic) of the article titles and author names, etc., were transferred from the Endnote database to the new Bookends database. This did not require any additional curation of the database. So if you have years of effort building your citation literature database in Endnote, you do not have to waste additional time to get going in Bookends. Lastly, on macOS the literature scanning interface (an add-in) for Microsoft Word works excellently. The resulting articles are no different from what Endnote would have prepared, and you get additional controls over what the in-text citations do (suppresssion of superscripts, etc.) over what Endnote provides.
Well, to conclude this review, to be clear the availability of the Bookends iOS app is what is driving me to do the Endnote to Bookends conversion. The iOS app is great, easily the best bibliographic setup available on iOS, and the developer is active, making improvements and supporting the app very well over time. The Bookends platform is widely reviewed as being great, and I would like to add my unreserved favorable recommendation.Show lessW9W
Best research tool for resource management
Good for research. Love it. A big fan for over a decade.Mestrius
Not $10 worth of product!
I literally own thousands of apps (yes, I really do) and never, ever, have I had an app before not work because it needed IP verification. They say I need to context Comcast and correct that. LOL! Yeah, right! Design your app better. Deleted app. Besides, there is nothing here worth $10.Eriptron
Would give 5 stars...
I would give this app 5 stars (and buy the full version) if there were more advance search features or a way to filter the results. Another bonus would be the ability link it to my academic account for Google Scholar and other databases.jennk22
