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Mendeley

Score2.7 out of 10

21 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Mendeley?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Mendeley.
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Time to switch gears

Erwan Pannier
Post-Graduate Researcher in Research & Development at CentraleSupelec (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used to use Mendeley to handle our literature review and share notes

Pros

  • Search in pdf (former version, not current)

Cons

  • 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

Return on Investment

  • We're now loosing time switching all our notes from Mendeley to alternative reference time

Alternatives Considered

Zotero

Other Software Used

Zotero

Decreased functionality since becoming web-based

Franklin LinamView profile
PhD Student in Research & Development at University of Delaware (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I and my coworkers have used Mendeley to manage scientific research paper references and citations. It allows generation of properly formatted citations with a Word plugin which saves much time.

Pros

  • It is free
  • It has available citation styles for every journal
  • It allows reading of papers along with citing them

Cons

  • In my opinion, terrible web-based function in the new version
  • Very difficult to annotate and search in PDF's
  • New version removed many previous functions

Most Important Features

  • Reference management
  • Paper annotation
  • Citation formatting

Return on Investment

  • Saves time when submitting papers to different journals
  • Organizing references from different topics/projects
  • Annotating papers

Best for sharing and citing your references.

Incentivized
Diego Fernando Martínez AyalaView profile
Research Lead in Research & Development at Rokk3r Labs (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Organizing references
  • Sharing references
  • Annotating documents

Cons

  • Summary capabilities for non research personnel
  • Getting documents from watch folders automatically

Most Important Features

  • Sharing research
  • Annotating documents

Return on Investment

  • It is great that for instance, you download the paper you need once, and share it with your entire team.
  • You can present your annotation with the team!

Alternatives Considered

ReadCube Papers

Other Software Used

ReadCube Papers, Sublime Text, Bitbucket, LastPass for Business

Mendeley Keeps You Organized and Does the Work for You!

Incentivized
Craig West
CEO (Chief Executive Officer) in Corporate at Psychwest, Clinical & Forensic Psychology, Inc. (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Easily works with Word
  • Importing different reference formats
  • Organization
  • Finding relevant references

Cons

  • Some bugs noted with Word, especially when tables are included, had to uninstall add-in from Word for the tables to work correctly.
  • Finding books for research and being able to place the titles as references. We can import them from other sources, however, working, for instance, in conjunction with Google, would help to gather citations from other relevant work other than journal articles.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Other Software Used

Microsoft 365 Business, ABBYY FineReader, 1Password

Mendeley = Mostly Okay

Incentivized
Verified User
Team Lead (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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

Cons

  • Syncing errors when using multiple devices occur infrequently (but still too often), leading to lost work and retrieved articles
  • Mendeley's servers sometimes are down, which prevents group work from being conducted on multiple machines through group folders

Return on Investment

  • N/A

Alternatives Considered

Zotero

Other Software Used

Zotero