Bookends

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.

Looked promising but is lacking in proper sync functionality. I set up the first library of 3 citations and saved to iCloud (purchased all upgrades) using an iPad. Down-synced on iPhone. There are seemingly no attachments. Re-downloaded one from the web and now there are suddenly two attachments. The others have again no attachments. Already read all available documentation and web posts without success and double-checked program, sync and iCloud settings. Seems to be a bug, but one that wasted my $20 expenditure. I retracted my one star rating but needs a try-before-you-buy for its advanced features for any unreserved recommendation and before the prospective user would spend money without any refund option. Also, the interface does not reflect the purchase and subscription status as the purchase/upgrade options appear unchanged irrespective of purchase status. I appreciate the developer response and had already tried those options and read all documentation. Repeating the steps did not work unfortunately.

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.

As a independent business consultant and genealogist, my days are spent researching and writing. After using Sente, Papers 3 and Mendeley, Bookends is a clear winner. Synchronization across my iMac and iPad efficiently operates in the background using iCloud. The ability to highlight, take inline notes and summary notes all from within the app is invaluable as I hate having to switch between various tools. Bookends (macOS) allows for scripting which enabled exporting notes into Scrivener (my writing platform) via OPML. Once writing, insertion of citekeys is straightforward. Bookends is an indispensable cornerstone application within my workflow.

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Used to be there were Papers and PaperShip, now Bookends appears to be the few games left in town for professional reading/annotation tools for researchers. Among the many functions lacking: * Ability to parse out a given PDF to get at least the title, authors and abstract into the meta data when there’s no search result available. * Ability to connect to services such as Mendeley to get the existing meta data/pdfs down. * Remember the state of the app when quitting. * After adding a pdf with no meta data, there appears to be no way to get meta data into the entry (at least not reliably). * The workflow at times seem nondeterministic, e.g., when finding a paper from in-app search and adding attachment pdf later, sometimes the paper only appears in the search section, not in the main “all documents” list. * Dark mode still needs a lot of fixing.