It seems to me that competition is heating up between the
different reference managers that are available. I am seeing more people using
Zotero and Mendeley, although Endnote is still the weapon of choice for most
people. However, the other two products are free, at least if you do not need
the extra storage space available for a price.
To consider Mendeley first, I confess that I have never got
on with it very well. The interface into Word has been cleaned up significantly
and it does work, but except for Science Direct I have not been very successful
in capturing online papers and other references, for example from JSTOR.
Perhaps it is just me.
The other thing which people do object to with Mendeley is
that, in April 2013, it was brought by Elsevier, the publishers. Firstly, the
question that springs to mind is “why?” According to
this
article, it is to gain access to the data flows of all the article sharing and
groups and so on that the social media side of the product produces. That, of
course, is modern business for you, but you might object to your data being
used in this way.
The downside of the sharing ability is, of course, the
potential breach in copyright. Indeed, the article referred to above notes that
Elsevier were one of the protagonists in trying to stop PDF sharing, so that
every researcher had to buy their own copy from the publisher. The pros and
cons of this are, of course, arguable, but breaching copyright is actually
illegal.
Next up is Zotero, which has improved radically over the
last few years (i.e. since I last looked). The desktop version works nicely and
(once I found the tools) the integration into Word seems fine (the tools are on
the Word ‘Add-ins’ menu, but not named as Zotero, at least on my installation.
Again, Zotero offers some social networking ability, although I confess I have
not explored it as yet.
Finally, we come to the stalwart package of the field,
Endnote. This is costly (at least in comparison to the others) and proprietary,
although this does not mean that you are committed to using Endnote for
evermore, as some people seem to think. All of these packages are
interoperable, to a greater or lesser extent, although, annoyingly, some
struggle to transfer attached PDFs (I’m still looking into it). Endnote is
probably the most powerful, in that if the exact reference style you need is
not available, you can modify one, which is not, so far as I can tell,
available in either Zotero or Mendeley, at least without a great deal of blood,
sweat, and XML.
Of course, with power and flexibility comes complexity, and
Endnote is probably the most difficult of the packages to come to terms with.
It also has an online version, which is developing rapidly (and rather
confusingly) at present, but does not have social networking ability (at least,
as yet).
So, there you, you pays your money (or not) and you takes
your choice. As I mentioned, Mendeley would not do the things I wanted it to,
and so I can’t recommend it. Zotero and Endnote seem to be converging to
similar sorts of solutions, so far as I can tell.