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.
N/A
ReadCube Papers
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Digital Science company ReadCube now offers Papers, a reference management application.
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.
ReadCube Papers has become an indispensable tool for my research. It offers a solution that keeps my library of research articles organized, and has improved the numbers of papers I am reading and annotating. The user-friendly interface simplifies the process of categorizing papers, highlighting essential text, and adding personal notes directly to the documents. The library is available online and through their own in-house application, which has worked perfectly (and much better than other solutions I have tried to use previously). In short, ReadCube Papers has truly improved the way I manage my research materials, making my academic life much more efficient and enjoyable.
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
The graphic user interface is beautiful; adding literature to a project is a seamless process, annotations while collaborating are intuitive and sometimes even fun. Competitors might be cheaper but do not consolidate all the tools that ReadCube has been able to achieve.
