Mendeley vs. Paperpile

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.

• Easy to use interface
• The use of font size and style makes information easily discoverable within the article previews
• Drag-and-drop functions make article indexing particularly simple

Incentivized

• Search in pdf (does not exist in current version)
• Don't lock your annotations within their proprietary format
• Offline use (does not exist in current version)
• Support and answer to users

There are a lot of references that do a good job troubleshooting, although I am not sure there is a direct number to an actual person.

Incentivized

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

• Mendely has a free and paid version. Thus, you can start with the free version first, making it an ideal choice.
• Saves time and money by easily formatting APA style or any other style without hiring a consultant
• Gives links to the full article, thus further saving time in research.

Incentivized