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Citation Management

A guide to Citation Management using two of our recommended resources: Zotero and EndNoteWeb

About Mendeley

Mendeley is a reference management tool and academic social network that helps researchers organize, read, annotate, and cite scholarly literature. It was founded in 2008 and was acquired by Elsevier in 2013. Mendeley offers both free and premium subscription tiers, with the paid versions providing additional storage space and collaboration features. It's particularly popular among researchers who value its combination of reference management and social networking capabilities.

Pros and Cons of Using Mendeley

Pros:

  • PDF management. Strong PDF reader with annotation tools that allow highlighting, commenting, and note-taking directly within documents.
  • Cross-platform accessibility. Available on desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux), web browsers, and mobile devices, with synchronization across platforms.
  • Reference extraction. Generally good at automatically extracting metadata from PDFs and organizing bibliographic information.
  • Academic networking. Includes social features that allow connecting with other researchers and discovering related work in your field.
  • Word processor integration. Plugins for Microsoft Word and LibreOffice make citation insertion and bibliography generation straightforward.
  • Suggestions. Recommends relevant papers based on your library contents and research interests.
  • Free version availability. Basic functionality is available without cost (though with storage limitations).

Cons:

  • Storage limitations. Free version only includes 2GB of storage, requiring payment for additional space.
  • Elsevier ownership. Some researchers have privacy concerns or philosophical objections to using a product owned by a major commercial publisher.
  • Group collaboration limits. Free version restricts the number of private groups and collaborators.
  • Occasional metadata errors. Automatic extraction from PDFs sometimes produces inaccurate bibliographic information requiring manual correction.
  • Sync issues. Some users report occasional synchronization problems between devices.
  • Limited customization. Less flexible than some alternatives for organizing references in custom ways.
  • Citation style limitations. While it offers many citation styles, some specialized or custom styles may be more difficult to implement than in other tools.