WIP: Migrating from Sente 6 to Papers 3 via Endnote XML export

gistfile1.md

#This is a work in progress: YMMV (I'm working on an AppleScript supplement, so stay tuned...)

Migrating from Sente 6 to Papers3 via Endnote XML export

This process will export all of the references from Sente to an EndNote XML library suitable for import into Papers3. With a little shell magic, it will also set up the PDFs

Export

1. Select all references in Sente
2. File | Export | EndNote X | sente_endnote.xml

Change file paths

sed -i .bak 's/file:\/\//file:\/\/localhost/g' sente_endnote.xml    

Import into Papers

1. Create a new papers library (if necessary)
2. File | Import | EndNote XML Library | sente_endnote.xml
3. Wait...

Configure Papers

Library orgnization, syncing, etc...

This has been tested with Sente 6.7.7 into Papers 3.2.0

Issues

1. For some reason, potentially malformed file names in the EndNote export may fail to import. If that fails, the following procedure may work.

   1. Install bibutils from http://sourceforge.net/p/bibutils/home/Bibutils/

   2. Convert sente_endnote.xml to BibTex

      endx2xml -x sente_endnote.xml > sente_endnote.xml.temp

      xml2bib -sk -b sente_endnote.xml.temp > sente_endnote.bib

   3. Replace file:// with file://localhost

      sed -i .bak 's/file:\/\//file:\/\/localhost/g' sente_endnote.bib

   4. Replace %20 with spaces

      sed -i .bak2 's/%20/ /g' sente_endnote.bib

   5. Import the BibTex into Papers3

cool; useful. for newbies (like me) in the terminal language above replace "sente_endnote.xml" with the path and filename (perhaps something like ~/Desktop/export.xml if you sent it to your desktop).

This grabbed one attachment per record for me; for records that had multiple (like a webarchive and the pdf) it only grabbed one. Way better than nothing...looking forward to trying Papers3 and this makes that possible. Thanks very much for posting!!!

I would love an AppleScript for this very issue - would be very helpful! Sente is no longer being supported and is likely to break upon Apple's next major OS update, so those of us using Sente are in dire need of an alternative, and Papers 3 seems to be the best option. I know a number of folks who will need to follow these instructions in order to migrate - hence the need for the more user-friendly AppleScript. Thanks for all the work so far.

Good work. Thank you for sharing. Perhaps an additional hint: to also import keywords, make sure to check the box under Options upon file selection in Papers 3 to "Import and Convert Endnote to Papers keywords".

I've got another suggestion, based on my experience that when there are multiple attachments, only the first one is imported by Papers3. I think that if the first one is a "webarchive" and the second a "pdf", you may want the pdf. This can be achieved by the following line:
sed -i .bak -E 's/<urls><related-urls><url><style[^>]*>([^<]+)webarchive<\/style><\/url><url><style[^>]*>([^<]+)pdf<\/style><\/url>/<urls><related-urls><url>\2pdf<\/url>/g' sente_endnote.xml

Similarly, for removing a first attachment with a http URL while there is a second one with a file URL:
sed -i .bak -E 's/<urls><related-urls><url><style[^>]*>(http[^<]+)<\/style><\/url><url><style[^>]*>(file:[^<]+)pdf<\/style><\/url>/<urls><related-urls><url>\2pdf<\/url>/g' sente_endnote.xml