I prepared this reply before Martin's testimonial. Different perspectives...

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Jodi —

You have to drag the entry's row from the library browser, or (I recall) from the icon in the reference window.

Why do I like BE over the others? a few reasons.

* I do mission critical work with it and when I get stuck, a lack of support from the developer can be disastrous. This developer is very responsive and helpful. For this reason alone I recommend it.

* Over the last year, I have needed to do some very unusual things with my DB. Every time I ask how to do something weird, I get a response back that the feature for this esoteric thing is built in, sometimes with two options on how to proceed. There is much polish in this. Much.

* I use Mellel for print documents. Bookends has a very handy integration with Mellel such that as soon as you enter a reference marker (via command Y) the document is immediately scanned and the reference entered in the reference section. This sounds like an unnecessary luxury, rather like electric windows in a car. But once you use it, you wonder why it took so long.

* They have a kickass iOS application. Just kickass. After carrying my entire curated reference base in my pocket on my phone for a couple months, I broke down and bought an iPad ahead of schedule. Were it not for Bookends today, I would have waited for what Mark is working on for the iPad.

* I don’t know if the other reference managers support the option-drag that I use with TBx, but I think the Bookends guy actively works with other developers. I know he did with Mellel, Tinderbox and DevonThink and that on their forums you hear people asking for the others to act like Bookends.

A different topic. Regarding any of the apps that extract info from the PDF or that supplement from Google scholar...

I've found these to be no help. I'm not sure what sort of work you will be doing, but my reference database is very manicured. It takes a lot of work and you have to do it manually, helped only by macros.

— Ted

Peter,

Apologies for not having answered this sooner -- I didn't have notifications turned on, and I only visit these forums rarely, so I only stumbled on your question by accident today.

To answer your question briefly, I don't have a Sente->Tbx workflow.

I use Devonthink Pro Office as my main research repository. It will accept just about any kind of file, you can highlight text in almost any application and clip it straight to DTPO, and it has excellent search tools. Of course, once one has collected the information, one needs to make sense of it, and that is where Tbx is useful (for me). So I tend to conceptualise DTPO as my main data repository because of its capabilities in collection, storage, and retrieval, while Tbx is an analytical tool. Other people will do things differently, but that is what works for me, given the kind of material I collect, and the way I need to work with it (I work in psychology and history -- lots of pdfs! -- and as an aside, DTPO will even OCR a pdf that hasn't got a text layer -- very useful.) There is an AppleScript that will take notes from Sente and copy them to DTPO (http://www.complexpoint.macmate.me/Site/Sente_6_Notes_to_DEVONthink.html). That was what I was using to get the two programs to work together. Nothing stays still for long in the world of software, however, and I've since moved on to using Papers2 as my bibliographic database (encouraged by a massive discount!)  

All the best,
Martin.

Mel,

Thanks for your good wishes -- reciprocated!

I don't think there is an easy way to do what you want, though I may be wrong. As I understand it, Papers 2 is not applescriptable. However, Rob Trew (houthakker on various forums) wrote a script that directly accessed the SQL database in Papers 2 in order to extract certain information and send it to Devonthink. The script may be found through this page:

http://blog.devontechnologies.com/2011/03/1651/

There is a link to it. You may be able to alter it to extract the information you want, put it into a text file, and then import that into Tbx. If you don't have the skills with applescript, you might find someone on one of the forums who is generous enough to help.

Incidentally, things have moved on since I last posted here. After the Papers 3 disaster I decided to get out, and (with gritted teeth) I found myself using Bookends again. One thing that has changed is that I now have an iPhone, and Bookends is about the only solution (pace Mendeley, Zotero, etc) that will permit me to have my database on my phone as well.

Best of luck with it,
Martin.