Often I want to just do a quick check of whether I have a book in BibDesk already, or I want to find a PDF quickly. BibDesk has a nice search field, but you need to select the Library first to get a global search. Otherwise, you will only search within selected groups. Most of the time, I also want to perform these searches from another application when BibDesk isn’t even running. So I wrote a quick little script that (i) opens BibDesk, (ii) clears all search limitations, and (iii) puts the cursor in the search field:

Notice that you will need to change mybib.bib after theTitle to the name of your .bib file.

Then I set up a Quicksilver trigger to run the script when I press ^⌘<space>. Think of it like a Spotlight search just for your bibliography—quite helpful when you have several hundred bibliographic references.

This concludes my Skim/BibDesk series of posts, so look tomorrow for a summary post that pulls all the pieces together.