Book Review

Bookends Pro for the Macintosh -- Bibliography Management System

N Engl J Med 1994; 331:1535December 1, 1994

Article

Bookends Pro for the Macintosh -- Bibliography Management System
Version 3.0.3. By Jonathan D. Ashwell. Diskette (3.5“) with manual. Tiburon, Calif., Westing Software, 1994. System needed: Macintosh SE through Quadra series with System 6.05 or higher and at least 2 MB Ram (4 MB for System 7). $149 (single user).

Every user of MEDLINE has encountered the difficulty of storing and managing a large number of retrieved references. A bibliography-management software package makes it possible to create and maintain a personal bibliographic data base and to generate reference lists in accordance with the specifications of particular biomedical journals. The final output is a list of properly ordered references, ready for inclusion in a manuscript. When submission of the paper to a different journal is considered, the program can, in a matter of seconds, reformat the citation list in accordance with the requirements of the new journal.

References can be entered into the data base either by typing them in from the keyboard (e.g., book citations) or by down-loading them from public data bases, either on-line or CD-ROM (e.g., various MEDLINE vendors or Chemical Abstracts). Once references have been entered into a personal data base, searching through them is like searching a MEDLINE data base.

Use of a bibliographic package is probably the only efficient way to store and keep track of references of interest on a personal computer. Researchers will find such a package helpful in generating reference lists in the form and style they desire.

Bookends Pro is a powerful, easy-to-learn reference-management program with a clear interface. Each field (author, title, and abstract) can contain up to 30,000 characters, and the number of references within each data base is limited only by the size of available space on the hard disk. Search strategies include the use of Boolean operators (“and,” “or,” and “not”) that can be used in any combination of fields (e.g., title and abstract).

When one is preparing a manuscript on a word processor, citations are positioned within the text as codes representing a data-base entry. Bookends Pro scrutinizes the manuscript file and replaces these codes with sequential numbering or with references arranged by the author-year method. Simultaneously, the program prepares a list of citations in the background, using the punctuation and style requested by any of 90 biomedical journals. Additional formats can be customized for any combination of journal requirements. The current version lacks a standard screen showing multiple references, each condensed to a single row, nor does it include a split screen that makes it possible to show multiple references beside a detailed view of the highlighted reference. Version 3.0.4 is expected to run on the Power PC and on networks.

We highly recommend a reference-management package for filing references and constructing reference lists. Among the various packages on the market, we found Bookends Pro to be an excellent choice, thanks to its clear interface, ease of operation, and reasonable price.

Eytan Z. Blumenthal, M.D.
Daniel Mimouni, M.D.
Hadassah University Hospital, Jerusalem, Israel 91120