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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OneNote
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Microsoft's OneNote is a digital note-taking app, supporting photos, annotating, web page clipping, emailing, and synchronizing notes across devices.
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.
It is well suited for capturing weekly departmental task lists. For example, each week we create a new page in a shared departmental notebook. In this new page, each department member enters his/her top 3 accomplishments for the week and the top 3 things which the member will attempt to accomplish in the coming week. We then use this page during our Monday morning stand-up meeting and it helps provide an agenda, structure, and discussion points for the meeting.
OneNote synchronizes across platforms very quickly. I often find that notes entered, or updated, on my desktop are synchronized to my laptop and smartphone well before I ever open them up to access the information.
OneNote has apps for just every major platform available. This includes Windows, iOS, and Android. The web app has plenty of features so you won't feel let down if you have to access your notebooks through a browser.
The multimedia features of OneNote are wonderful. I can draw pictures, add sound bites, add videos, add files, and much more. This helps me capture the full context of a note, including any references that I might need, all within the note itself. I don't have to go outside of OneNote to find a video clip, logo, or soundbite.
OneNote could improve on its web clipping features. Evernote still beats it in terms of robustness, but OneNote is sufficient for most purposes.
OneNote could also improve on its tagging system. Its the other major way of categorizing notes, which Evernote uses to great effect, but OneNote de-emphasizes this in favor of a hierarchical ordering.
This is a silly point, but it drives me mad. OneNote's free-form editing on pages, meaning you can click anywhere and start editing makes for sloppier notes that aren't as well aligned. This could be an enjoyable feature for some, but for me, I like my pages orderly.
As this is not a compulsory tool in our organization, I would say all depends on the decision makers, however since this is a part of MS Office, I am sure we will have it for as long as we will possibly need it. However, I would not be so sure, if it was a separate product
It is easy to use day to day and has become a common use application like Outlook or Teams. There is little to no learning curve, and you can use it in the way that is most suitable for you. Features like moving sections of text around and creating new tabs is self-explanatory.
I find OneNote to perform very well. I experience quick load times and automatic updates which are two things that are very important to our organization. I personally do not integrate OneNote with other software or systems but I do like that it can generate a sharing link for other people to view.
Since it is part of Microsoft Office and used across the globe there are a lot of support options available. It's quickest to just do a google search which will have plenty of articles to help you since there are so many OneNote users but as an Office customer you also have access to Microsoft support and I have had good experiences with their support (probably because I'm with a large company who is a large customer to them).
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
I’ll be honest, once I met OneNote, I knew my search was over. I found a software package that could do everything I needed and more. Pen and paper are helpful but not searchable, not private, not easily shared. Your notebook can be misplaced or stolen. You cannot use it to access websites with a click. I was a user of Lotus notes back in the day and though it had better function than pen and paper, I lost my entire notebook twice because of system issues and it didn’t have 1/10th of the function OneNote had
By giving employees this tool, each one can try to make the most out of it, and use it as they want. I know that many employees are utilizing features of OneNote every day, and it does help them to work more organized, and more efficiently.
I don't think there is any negative impact. Those who don't know how to use the tool are likely not to use it, so there is no risk for negative impact other than the cost of the license.
