Improve pdf storage and reference management? BibDesk + DEVONthink + Bookends?

DEVONthink
1

I want a better way to store PDF documents that I reference in DEVONthink. I use the PDFs in two ways.

  • As a reference for technical information, such as details for a LaTeX package, programming language reference, etc.
  • As a reference for a citation where I need the details for inclusion in a bibliography.

Only a subset of the PDFs show up as research papers in the typical places, and only a handful have DOIs (digital object identifiers).

Calibre

I use Calibre for books. It works well for books and pdfs but I end up having to manually type in metadata for PDFs that are not available from a popular source like Amazon.

Bookends

Bookends does a reasonable job of finding details for popular research papers, but appears to be incapable of reading author, title, etc. directly from the document.

Zotero

Zotero has a “retrieve metadata” which I suspect works for popular research papers?

Other reference management software

Keep trying other and keep thinking BibDesk + DEVONthink must be the answer.

Monthly service fee tools

I have zero interest in tools that charge a monthly/periodic fee for use. I do not want a ransom tied to my workflow.

DEVONthink

When I import a PDF, DEVONthink typically reads the metadata from the PDF. This is great but it does not work well as a source for a bibliography.

Solutions?

There must be a combination that could work well for both storage and bibliography.
I really like BibDesk for building a bibliography. I see threads here for BibDesk and DEVONthink. This seems close? BibDesk does not search metadata for me when that is possible (for popular research papers). So Bookends + BibDesk + DEVONthink? If so how?

2

Bookends does a great job of reading metadata from many PDFs; it also is very capable of looking up additional metadata by itself online if it has a doi to start with. It is also scriptable which makes it easy to transfer data to/from DT3 or other apps. But scripting often is not necessary because it is highly customizable in terms of its citation formats, including RIS; you are likely to be able to determine an output format for text or CSV output compatible with most other software with which you want Bookends to interface.

3

I’ve used BibDesk much longer than I have DT (15+ years vs. 3 or so) - it was one of the first apps I downloaded when I switched from Windows XP, and I still use it daily (even though I don’t actually write in LaTeX). Its AppleScript support is top notch. A BD record can link to any URL or file, so it’s easy to integrate with DT.

But yeah, it’s not great at scraping PDFs and finding citations - I work around this with AppleScripts to search Google Scholar etc., and this:

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