For what its worth, I switched back to Sente after several weeks with BibDesk. Its a great program, but Sente beats it hands down when it comes to searching for references and automatically downloading PDF’s. While BibDesk can handle z39.50 searches (in addition to PubMed), Sente correctly maps PsychINFO records to the proper fields. And the real killer feature is that Sente can save searches, and alert you when new articles become available. I’m not trying sell you on anything, just stating what works best for me. Sente’s BibDesk support is not all it could be, but it works for the most part.

For eg: this is an ideal workflow:
1. download files and citation from IEEE/ACM(whichever).
2. save it in Bibdesk.
3. Bibdesk links all the files in the prescribed folder to the references based on their citekeys.
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I have been trying to do this for a while and I have been unsuccessful. Any suggestions??

If anything, I’d suggest a programmatic solution for this if possible. Any chance you could look at the datafile(s) that Sente creates/maintains and parse out the local filenames pointing to your existing PDFs?

If so – you could probably get them into your BibDesk file without handling each one one-by-one.

This looks like the most immediately helpful page… http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/forums/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=283&page=0

Perhaps this?
http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/index.cgi?page=sente&subPage=cite

– from the Sente site –

Exporting references
If you need to insert a list of references into any other software, Sente lets you specify a format and then simply drag and drop any number of references into any application that accepts RTF or plain text data. For example, to tell colleagues about some interesting new papers that just appeared in one of your standing Sente searches, you can simply drag them into a mail message and they will be inserted in whatever format you have selected. Do you want to include abstracts and your own notes? Or do you want to send BibTeX entries? No problem, just pick the right format and drop the references wherever you want.

Bibliography format editor
Sente comes with several of the most commonly used bibliography formats installed. But what if you need something else? Sente also includes an easy-to-use format editor where you can make a custom format to suit your needs. And it is easy to copy a supplied format and modify it to serve some other purpose.

You can also use the format editor to create special-purpose formats like BibTeX, Refer, HTML, XML, or even a tab-delimited export format. This lets you use Sente data in other applications or custom scripts.

I’d think your university would suggest the particular style itself – no?

I haven’t looked into style file selection yet myself.

This is it – http://scplugin.tigris.org/

I’ve found it significantly less powerful than the command line, but occasionally, it’s helpful to ’see’ what’s going on. Once you trust it.

The biggest issue for a while with the plugin was that the icons were ‘out of date’. A significant problem for something like svn integration. I see it has been updated in late January 07. It could very well be much better now.

These directions are for BibDesk 1.3.2.

Thanks.

The only recommendation I’d make is to use the relative-path feature in the auto-file options; otherwise, if you check out your subversion repository anywhere other than your current machine, all of the BibDesk local URLs will be incorrect (and you’ll have to do a query-replace in a text editor to fix them).