Recently in General Reference Management Category

Improved Note Taking

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I would like to say a few words about our latest release, which includes a major update to Sente's note-taking features.

Since the release of version 5.0 in 2007, Sente has included the ability to attach multiple notes to each reference. (Earlier versions restricted you to a single note per reference.) Each note included a title, page range, quotation and comments.

For many users, this has been a valuable feature, and they mention it regularly in posts about Sente. But we have never been particularly fond of Sente's interface for creating and editing notes. It worked, but it was neither attractive nor terribly functional.

In Sente 5.7, we have completely rewritten the notes interface and we are much happier with the results.  In the new interface, it is easy to see more than one note at a time, and we make better use of limited screen space.  Also, it is now possible to copy one or more notes from within the Notes view, and then to paste them into most other applications.

We have also added a feature that makes it simple to create notes from selections in PDFs or web pages. You can select either text or any arbitrary region in either a PDF or a web page, and then, if you click on the Create Note button, Sente will automatically create a new note for the current reference using the selection as the quotation.  Sente will also fill in the page numbers and add a placeholder title for you.

This ability to create notes from PDFs is not intended as a replacement for tools that let you mark-up a PDF, like Preview and Skim.  If what you want to accomplish is to highlight portions of a PDF so that the next time you read the document you will see these annotations, then we would recommend that you use one of these other tools.  (Annotations created in Preview, unlike those created in Skim, will show up in the Links view within Sente, so you will not need to return to Preview to view them.)

These changes should make Sente's notes feature more useful to many of our users.  I would encourage you to watch the new video on our web site and then to download the latest version and give it a try.

Sente Undergraduate Edition

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We have just released the Undergraduate Edition of Sente and I wanted to say a few words about this new version of Sente.

Since we first launched Sente back in 2004, our focus has been on providing the best reference manager for the most demanding users.  This has lead to the development of features like standing searches, hierarchical libraries, targeted browsing and automatic PDF import, to name a few.  During this time, the growth in the use of Sente by graduate students, professors and research professionals has been dramatic.

But we have heard from many undergraduates over the years who really like Sente's features and intuitive user interface, but who cannot justify the cost of the software because they will only use it to gather the references for a handful of papers each year.  These users are not really interested in setting up standing searches or importing large collections of PDF files; they just want an alternative to EndNote.

To make Sente more affordable for this type of user, we are now offering Sente Undergraduate Edition, which has all of the features of Sente, but has a limit of 250 references per library.  This limitation, while too restrictive for most graduate students and researchers, is more than enough for most undergraduate papers.

Sente Undergraduate Edition is not limited in any way other than the size of the library that can be created.

Sente Undergraduate Edition is available now from Kagi for $34.95.  The Undergraduate Edition can be upgraded to the regular academic version for $64.95.

The New Bibliography Fields View

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I would like to say a few words introducing a new feature in Sente: the Bibliography Fields view in the reference editor.  Here is a screen shot of the new view:

Picture 7b.png

The new view has three major sections.

The top section is where you select one of your favorite bibliography formats.  I would normally recommend that you select the style that you use most often.  Here, the selected style is "APA 5."

The first field in the next section is the reference type.  The value selected in this pop-up determines which fields are displayed in the rest of this section.  In the screen shot above, the selected type is "journal article" so the fields relevant to journal articles are displayed.  There may be data in fields that are not shown here, but fields that are not shown have no effect on the bibliography entry for the selected reference type.

For many reference type / bibliography format combinations, there are fields that are not used in the selected format, but are used in some other common format.  These fields appear below a label that begins "Items below this point..."  While you may want to enter values for one or more of these fields, the data will not appear in the bibliography entry for this reference in the selected format.

The bottom section of the Bibliography Fields view is the preview of the selected reference in the selected format.  This preview is kept up-to-date with changes to the fields above as you leave each field after making a change.  This lets you see just how each reference will appear in the final output in your documents.  (Obviously, the final results may differ slightly if, for example, the selected style calls for repeated authors to be replaced with three dashes.  The preview here is how the reference would appear if it were the only reference in the bibliography.)

The important point to remember about this new view is that the fields that are displayed are based entirely on the reference type.  This list of fields is then prioritized based on the selected bibliography format to place at the bottom any of the fields that are not actually used in the format for the selected reference type.

If you are a Sente user who gets most of your references from PubMed, this new feature will not make a big difference to you.  On the other hand, if you are in the humanities or any field where you regularly deal with many different types of references, and you regularly deal with complex bibliography formats, you should find this new view very helpful as you add references to your library.


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This page is an archive of recent entries in the General Reference Management category.

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