Clarivate Analytics headquartered in Philadelphia offers EndNote, a reference library and management software. Endnote helps users save time, stay organized, collaborate with colleagues, and get published.
$99.95
Mendeley
Score 2.7 out of 10
N/A
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.
There are lot of bibliographic compilation softwares in the market but no other product have these extensive tools and options to facilitate the easy of use and effective work done on EndNote. Price wise bit high end but work wise highly effective. Transferring the libraries and accessing on multiple devices also a added advantage in EndNote. The newly enabled synchronisation option was very useful.
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.
Support seems to be good both on the technical side of the software the actual usage of the software. We have encountered minor as well as some major issues especially during upgrades but were able to work through them very quickly with the help of the support team and this allowed us to stay on track when there have been time crunches.
Although Mendeley has comparable functionality, the two applications are not compatible, and it is harder to import non-formatted citations into Mendeley. However, Mendeley does offer superior analytics compared to EndNote. I continue to use EndNote due to a history of successful use of EndNote and the widespread use of the app by my peers.
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
