---
title: Intro to BibDesk
tags: [BibDesk]
summary: An introductory description of BibDesk, a program that allows you to store all your bibliographic info.
---

In several of the scripts I use to interact with [Skim], I have
mentioned that they receive bibliographic information from
[BibDesk].  BibDesk is an excellent bibliography management tool
similar to [Mendeley] or [Zotero].  I like BibDesk for three main
reasons: (i) like Skim, it is a free and open source project
created by academics for other academics, (ii) it stores all its
data in a flat BibTex file, and (iii) it can interact easily with
Skim via AppleScript.  In another post I will talk more about the
implications of (ii), but for now just know that this means BibDesk
talks easily with [Pandoc] and [LaTeX] without the need to export
anything.  Both Mendeley and Zotero can achieve the same result,
but one needs to export every time a change is made to the
bibliography.

Several of my colleagues have asked me to recommend a good
bibliography manager, but they have not wanted to dive headlong
into LaTeX citations (the learning curve is admittedly quite
steep).  In this post, I would like to simply introduce BibDesk as
a stand-alone bibliography manager.  When working with BibDesk,
every bibliographic reference gets an entry---think of this like
the old catalog cards at the library.  When filling out the entry
it looks like this:

![BibDesk Catalog Entry](/images/Screen2014-07-081.png)

Just at this stage, BibDesk has already become useful: rather than
pick a book off the shelf to look for the bibliographic information
or search ten clicks deep in the university library's arcane
catalog, you enter your info once and it is here for you to
reference in the future.  If you have a PDF associated with the
entry, then you can set up BibDesk to automatically file the PDF
based on this bibliographic data---no more cluttered downloads
folder with a mysterious `3978503409348.pdf`!

Without getting into compiled citations, BibDesk can still be quite
useful.  It uses templates to generate pre-formated output for a
given catalog entry.  If you make sure that `View > Bottom Preview
> Default RTF template` is checked you will see something like this
at the bottom of your main screen:

![BibDesk default RTF template](/images/Screen2014-07-082.png)

This is useful for copying and pasting into other applications like
Word.  But how many times do you really want your bibliographic
data in *that* format?  I prefer to use Chicago-style footnotes and
it is a pain to format each note individually much less remember
where to put that pesky comma.  So I created an RTF template that
automatically arranges the relevant data in the Chicago way, being
sensitive to whether we are dealing with a book, a journal article,
or an article from a book.  With this template selected the output
looks like this:

![My Chicago Footnote Template in BibDesk](/images/Screen2014-07-083.png)

Now when I am working in Word (God forbid!) and I want a footnote,
I can just select this pre-formatted version and paste it into my
footnote.  If you want this same template just download this [file]
to your `~/Library/Application\ Support/BibDesk/Templates` folder
and add it in the BibDesk `Templates` preference pane.  You can
even do multiple catalog entries at once by selecting more than
one.  If you want to create your own templates I suggest taking a
look at the [BibDesk Wiki page].

But wait, it gets better!  You can skip the step of selecting the
text at the bottom and instead simply drag and drop the catalog
entry into Word, or select a citation and press `⌘C`.  To do so
simply select your new Chicago footnote template in the BibDesk
`Citations` preference pane:

![BibDesk Preference Pane Citations](/images/Screen2014-07-084.png)

In a later post we will come to find out that this is *still* way
more work than you need to do, but leveraging the full power of
BibDesk will require working with LaTeX, and this (understandably)
scares many people away.


[BibDesk Wiki page]: https://sourceforge.net/p/bibdesk/wiki/Templates/
[file]:     /files/ChicagoFootnote.rtf
[LaTeX]:    http://www.latex-project.org
[Pandoc]:   http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
[Zotero]:   https://www.zotero.org
[Mendeley]: http://www.mendeley.com
[Skim]:     http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/
[BibDesk]:  http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net