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As someone who has been a longtime longtime Zotero user is there any good reason for me to check out Mendeley? I played with it once awhile back, but not enoug

by quanics 14y ago

As someone who has been a longtime longtime Zotero user is there any good reason for me to check out Mendeley? I played with it once awhile back, but not enough to get a good feel for it. Zotero worked well, and continues to work well for me. Are there different use cases for one vs. the other that I might be missing?

jofer 14y ago
If you have lots of pdf's on your hard drive that you want to automatically extract metadata from (or organize), it's quite nice. It's easy to go from nested folders of pdf's --> Mendeley --> bibtex file, with a reasonably minimal amount of quality control. I may be misremembering, but I don't think zotero is geared towards that?
- kanzure 14y ago
  > I don't think zotero is geared towards that Zotero can import pdfs and figure out metadata, just like Mendeley, except without using OCR.
- simonster 14y ago
  Zotero can extract metadata from PDFs, but at present it can't import folder structure. We're always happy to take patches: https://github.com/zotero/zotero https://github.com/zotero/zotero
- jamesjporter 14y ago
  FWIW I prefer Zotero because I find downloading the pdf to actually be rather annoying. I just save the citation and double click on it to open the article in my browser whenever I need it. No metadata extraction necessary b/c Zotero pulls metadata from a doi or PMID (which is a quick copy and paste from the web) and unsurprisingly does it much better than Mendely pulls metadata from pdfs.
rsvidal 14y ago
You can easily synch your Zotero library into Mendeley (check preferences). Mendeley is (in my biased opinion) easier to use with a better user interface. It allows you to read, annotate, collaborate in groups, etc. Sync to the web so you can run Mendeley on multiple operating systems (and even mobile apps). While not always up-to-date, here's a large comparison table of reference management tools: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_managem...

by quanics 14y ago

jofer 14y ago

If you have lots of pdf's on your hard drive that you want to automatically extract metadata from (or organize), it's quite nice. It's easy to go from nested folders of pdf's --> Mendeley --> bibtex file, with a reasonably minimal amount of quality control. I may be misremembering, but I don't think zotero is geared towards that?

kanzure 14y ago
> I don't think zotero is geared towards that Zotero can import pdfs and figure out metadata, just like Mendeley, except without using OCR.
simonster 14y ago
Zotero can extract metadata from PDFs, but at present it can't import folder structure. We're always happy to take patches: https://github.com/zotero/zotero https://github.com/zotero/zotero
jamesjporter 14y ago
FWIW I prefer Zotero because I find downloading the pdf to actually be rather annoying. I just save the citation and double click on it to open the article in my browser whenever I need it. No metadata extraction necessary b/c Zotero pulls metadata from a doi or PMID (which is a quick copy and paste from the web) and unsurprisingly does it much better than Mendely pulls metadata from pdfs.

rsvidal 14y ago

You can easily synch your Zotero library into Mendeley (check preferences). Mendeley is (in my biased opinion) easier to use with a better user interface. It allows you to read, annotate, collaborate in groups, etc. Sync to the web so you can run Mendeley on multiple operating systems (and even mobile apps). While not always up-to-date, here's a large comparison table of reference management tools: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_managem...