4 ms·

Mendeley is not bad at all. I save papers to a Dropbox folder, organized directories by general topic / relevance to project. Mendeley (on one computer) watche

Mendeley is not bad at all. I save papers to a Dropbox folder, organized directories by general topic / relevance to project. Mendeley (on one computer) watches that folder, and imports the papers and fills out the bibliographic info, mostly automatically. Mendeley lets you tag and organize things in virtual folders, as well as store notes and annotations. The bibliographic info for subsets of papers (eg. with a particular tag) can be exported to bibtex files when writing. Mendeley is available on all platforms, and syncs across multiple computers. The only catch is that the links to PDFs are only maintained on the 'master' that watches the folder. (If you try to watch folders on multiple instances of the same synced database, all hell breaks loose.) Pubchase (www.pubchase.com) can also sync with your Mendeley library, and does a surprisingly good job of recommending papers of interest.

jessriedel 11y ago
What is the advantage of Mendeley over Zotero? My understanding is that Zotero implements essentially all of Mendeley's features, and is free and open-source. (Here's the comparison according to Mendeley: https://www.mendeley.com/compare-mendeley/ https://www.mendeley.com/compare-mendeley/ ). I think most people just haven't heard of it. It's supported and developed by a foundation, and if you ever stop liking it you can take all your data and move it to Mendeley very quickly. On the other hand, I don't think it's easy to leave Mendeley: https://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestions/1186641-bulk-export-pdf https://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestion... EDIT: Here's how Docear compares them: http://www.docear.org/2014/01/15/comprehensive-comparison-of-reference-managers-mendeley-vs-zotero-vs-docear/ http://www.docear.org/2014/01/15/comprehensive-comparison-of... Zotero lacks Android/iOS apps (except for Zandy on Android, which is poor).
- aheilbut 11y ago
  I should probably give Zotero another try. At the time I started using Mendeley, it was really the best at automatically importing metadata for pdfs. And I don't think Zotero does the watch folder thing. One thing I do like about Mendeley is that it's content to leave my pdfs alone in the filesystem (and I can rely on Dropbox for syncing those), whereas Zotero seems to want to import everything and manage the files itself.
  - jessriedel 11y ago
    You're right about Zotero wanting to manage the PDFs. With regard to a watch folder, there's ZotFile which works very nicely (but of course something that's fully integrated is always preferable). http://zotfile.com/ http://zotfile.com/
saboot 11y ago
I like that mendeley can rename files according to a format, however it only works when it's setup to use its own local folder (which mirrors the mendeley cloud space).
praseodym 11y ago
I'm currently using Mendeley, but its BibTeX export is really lacking: - http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestions/444383-fix-capitalization-of-journal-titles http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestions... - https://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestions/1543195-possibility-for-choosing-which-fields-are-included https://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestion... - https://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestions/859693-improve-support-for-diacritics-in-bibtex https://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestion...

jessriedel 11y ago

What is the advantage of Mendeley over Zotero? My understanding is that Zotero implements essentially all of Mendeley's features, and is free and open-source. (Here's the comparison according to Mendeley: https://www.mendeley.com/compare-mendeley/ https://www.mendeley.com/compare-mendeley/ ). I think most people just haven't heard of it. It's supported and developed by a foundation, and if you ever stop liking it you can take all your data and move it to Mendeley very quickly. On the other hand, I don't think it's easy to leave Mendeley: https://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestions/1186641-bulk-export-pdf https://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestion... EDIT: Here's how Docear compares them: http://www.docear.org/2014/01/15/comprehensive-comparison-of-reference-managers-mendeley-vs-zotero-vs-docear/ http://www.docear.org/2014/01/15/comprehensive-comparison-of... Zotero lacks Android/iOS apps (except for Zandy on Android, which is poor).

aheilbut 11y ago
I should probably give Zotero another try. At the time I started using Mendeley, it was really the best at automatically importing metadata for pdfs. And I don't think Zotero does the watch folder thing. One thing I do like about Mendeley is that it's content to leave my pdfs alone in the filesystem (and I can rely on Dropbox for syncing those), whereas Zotero seems to want to import everything and manage the files itself.
- jessriedel 11y ago
  You're right about Zotero wanting to manage the PDFs. With regard to a watch folder, there's ZotFile which works very nicely (but of course something that's fully integrated is always preferable). http://zotfile.com/ http://zotfile.com/

saboot 11y ago

I like that mendeley can rename files according to a format, however it only works when it's setup to use its own local folder (which mirrors the mendeley cloud space).

praseodym 11y ago

I'm currently using Mendeley, but its BibTeX export is really lacking: - http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestions/444383-fix-capitalization-of-journal-titles http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestions... - https://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestions/1543195-possibility-for-choosing-which-fields-are-included https://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestion... - https://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestions/859693-improve-support-for-diacritics-in-bibtex https://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestion...