Find. Collect. Organize. Annotate. Sync. Share. Publish.

Collect

Seek and ye shall find

Import references and PDFs (access privileges may be required) from PubMed, PubMed Central, Google Scholar, JSTOR, Google Books, Web of Science, arXiv, the Library of Congress, and hundreds of institutions around the world.

Discover yourself

Instantly find, read, and import publications that have cited works in your library. Obtain citation and publication metrics from trusted online sources that cover vast amounts of literature. Do you have an ORCID ID? Bookends will use it to instantly create an up-to-date interactive listing of your publications and the works that have cited them. Academic self-discovery.

Interact

Play nice with others

Integrate your work with other applications: import references from EndNote, Papers, Sente, Zotero, and Mendeley; insert into or embed in Bookends live links for applications such as Tinderbox, DEVONthink, and Scrivener; enjoy integration with Microsoft Word, Mellel, and Nisus Writer Pro. And like all good macOS-native apps, Bookends is AppleScript-able.

Organize

Everything in its place

Unlimited multi-level hierarchical folders and groups (static and smart) bring your reference data soup into coherence. Identify and reuse recurring data from self-updating Term Lists.

Get attached

Attach PDFs, images, Word documents, or anything you want. Let Bookends rename and organize your attachments in a central location. Search your library for references and the contents of their attached PDFs simultaneously to find just the articles you want.

PDF central

The full-featured PDF reader lets you add markup and annotations, which automatically integrate with the interactive note stream. Share annotations with other PDF readers and Bookends for iOS (of course). Create deep PDF links for instant access to your annotations and thoughts while in other applications. Bookends can even extract PDF annotations with full details and deep links — from one, a few, or all of your attachments in one go. And a tabbed PDF display lets you switch between them and their associated references with a click.

No book is an island

Like people, references may be related. Create links between items such a book and its chapters, an article and the works it cites, or any other relationship you can dream up. See all relatives at a glance, move between them with a click, and even combine portions from each in a single bibliographic citation.

Hypertextualization

Have Bookends create hypertext links to references, groups, folders, and PDF content. Connect references to apps in the outside world, and vice versa. Take logical jumps from one reference to another, and back again. Follow the interconnecting breadcrumbs, one click at a time.

Every cloud has a silver lining

Tag clouds are visual depictions of the terms in your references, and each tag's frequency is indicated by size and color. They're not just pretty, they let you quickly winnow the references to just the ones you want.

Think locally, act globally

Curate your library using a plethora of global operations. Find/replace, consolidate related names and terms, move fields, change case, standardize names, and more allow you to instantly update one or all of your references and PDFs with a click.

Sync

Sync alike

Bookends uses iCloud to effortlessly keep your references and groups in sync across all of your devices, so you don't need to schlep your databases from one computer to another. Share libraries with colleagues using Bookends, so everyone in your group is up-to-date. And with our companion app, Bookends for iOS, you'll always have current information with you, wherever you are.

Publish

Float (and cite) like a butterfly

Double-tap the Control key while in any word processor to bring up Floating Citations. Searching, citing, viewing PDFs, and more are at your fingertips, all the time.

Do it with style

Publishers impose strict rules on how citations and bibliographies appear. Bookends provides an intuitive format editor with which you can use or modify the hundreds we already ship, or create your own. And in a pinch, Bookends can download and use any of thousands of Citations Style Language (CSL) styles to get the job done.

Get it in writing

Scan word processor manuscripts to create publication-ready documents complete with in-text citations, footnotes, and bibliographies. Scan directly from within Microsoft Word, Mellel, and Nisus Writer Pro, or scan Apple Pages, LibreOffice, and RTF files from within Bookends. In just a few moments you're ready to submit and publish.

And So Much More

15 versions worth of features and refinements

• Live searches update the results instantly as you type.

• A highly-configurable user interface.

• Quick Add references when you have only the DOI, PMID, ISBN, JSTOR URL, or arXiv id.

• Import references cited in, or that cite, articles in PubMed.

• Retrieve reference metadata from PDFs automatically or with a little help from you.

• Incredibly flexible subject bibliographies.

• Finder-compatible file tags let you keep track of your PDFs in Bookends and across apps.

• Unique reference "metatypes" let you cite data from two different references at once.

• Take control of orphaned or marooned attachments.

• Email references and attachments to colleagues.

• And far more than we can list...