Digital Science company ReadCube now offers Papers, a reference management application.
$36
per user
Zotero
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
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.
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.
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
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.
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
