I am more or less forced to use EndNote by its popularity in my institution, but I use Papers to manage my PDFs. It's a Mac application which sees itself as managing PDF documents and tagging them with their bibliographic information, retrieved from sites like PubMed. This is quite different to traditional bibliographic software, which sees itself as a card index of bibliographic information to which you can attach PDFs. It's ideal for people who, like me, have the hunted feeling that they have a paper about this, and that the paragraph they need is on the top left on the second or third page, but cannot for the life of them remember a title or author. The only disadvantage is that at present it cannot be used for managing references within a document.

I also have enjoyed using Sente, a Mac package which has a powerful live search feature. You can set up searches which automatically update, and filter the results rapidly and easily. It can be used for referencing documents.

On 13 Jan 2011, at 10:28, Jo Jordan wrote:

I have managed to find a way round these issues, but was wondering
what software packages other people use for this task and to see if
there is anything better out there.