Mendeley, an Elsevier company headquartered in London, offers their eponymous reference management software suite, including Mendeley Reference Manager, Web Importer, the Citation Plugin add-on, available in Premium package.
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Zotero
Score 9.4 out of 10
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Zotero is a free reference management tool developed as a project developed at Carnegie Mellon and supported by a small team at George Mason University.
Mendeley was an easy-to-use free reference manager which integrates seamlessly with Word. It is great for exporting formatted citations and for converting from different citation styles easily. The new version is web-based, however, which means unless you open all your files of interest and sign in before leaving WiFi connection, you cannot work offline (even though the PDF's are downloaded locally). In my opinion, the new version also makes it much more difficult to annotate papers and the search function is essentially useless because it no longer searches through text within files but only in the title, authors, journal, etc. fields. Because it is now entirely web-based, anytime their website has issues, you cannot access your papers and citations, which means you can't work on writing your thesis, which is why I am writing this review right now. Overall, Mendeley used to be a great free option with good functionality, but Elsevier has decided to remove functions with newer versions of the software.
Zotero (with its good buddy Zotfile) is well suited for any researcher who wants to go completely paperless in their research process, or who wants a centralized library system to manage their research projects, including attachments, notes, annotations, sources, and bibliographies. It is geared towards academic and social sciences researchers. Zotero is a powerful tool with a learning curve, and as such it might not be worth the investment of time and energy for end-users with simple research project needs.
Zotero's MS Word and Google Docs plug-ins and Chrome extension makes the process of storing, indexing, and citing sources seamless
Zotero's automated retrieval of embedded metadata in PDFs and websites is incredibly accurate, which increases my confidence in the citations created by Zotero
The library of available citation styles is extensive and largely accurate
I love that Zotero syncs your work and citations online, which allows me to work from multiple devices (e.g., laptop, office desktop, computer labs)
Zotero is a fantastic software for researchers. We do pay for 6 GB of storage for each user, so their libraries can be backed to the cloud beyond the 300 MB of allowed free storage. It's low-cost, or can be free if you don't opt into that version. No other citation manager comes even close to Zotero in its capabilities, user-friendly nature, and cost, nor do they innovate their features constantly like Zotero and have open source support online
once you adapt to the interface, which could feel a bit outdated and old school, its incredible intuitive. An aesthetic improvement could make it reach a whole other level, just if it does not lose any of its usability features. Its quite intuitive and the learning curve is very short.
Always available. I have it downloaded on my desktop and it opens quickly/immediately, holds open the articles I was reading on the page I was at, and is always ready-to-go for something like Word integration for adding citations
Everything loads shockingly quickly. PDFs open much faster in Zotero than they do in Adobe Acrobat, all changes to PDFs are saved, the citation manager opens relatively quickly in Word, the tool updates with the online Zotero interface and automatically syncs seamlessly
I have never used Zotero support. I can answer the questions I need to from googling or finding others who have asked my same question in the Zotero support community forums
In ~2014 I and our Lab chose Mendeley over Zotero because it had more functionalities (annotate directly in pdf) and being a commercial product it might have had more support. Ten years have passed and it turns out that there was never support (latest versions of Mendeley Desktop did not add any extra feature over the 2014+ one, and the newest Mendeley Online Manager actually regressed extremely (!!) ) ; meanwhile Zotero, despite being only open-source supported, caught up on the features (and has inline pdf annotation). None of these Reference Manager softwares are really satisfying when it comes to collaboration & shared annotations (compared to shared experience on writing software like Gdocs or Word 365), but at least Zotero is on a positive path while Mendeley is clearly regressing as years pass by, so it's time to switch gears
Mendeley isn't open source like Zotero and doesn't have well-built browser plug-ins, although it has a better, more modern interface. Zotero has limitations with PDFs, but Mendeley doesn't support them at all. For Qiqqa, it is a better alternative and is open source as well. However, like Mendeley, there isn't a good base of plug-ins like Zotero has and, as a result, suffers from ease of use.
All features of Zotero have always worked just fine to me. In my many years using it, I've never run into issues. And when I do want to maximize my use of some feature or learn more, the product support communities are helpful. It's an extremely consistent, reliable software
