Digital Science company ReadCube now offers Papers, a reference management application.
$36
per user
Zotero
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Zotero is a free reference management tool developed as a project developed at Carnegie Mellon and supported by a small team at George Mason University.
ReadCube Papers has become an indispensable tool for my research. It offers a solution that keeps my library of research articles organized, and has improved the numbers of papers I am reading and annotating. The user-friendly interface simplifies the process of categorizing papers, highlighting essential text, and adding personal notes directly to the documents. The library is available online and through their own in-house application, which has worked perfectly (and much better than other solutions I have tried to use previously). In short, ReadCube Papers has truly improved the way I manage my research materials, making my academic life much more efficient and enjoyable.
Zotero is well suited for any researcher, student or writer that wants to easily cite sources for web platforms that do not have easy citing tools integrated within the website. There are many browser plug-ins built for Zotero that allow users to click a button directly from the source into the main software and from there can be more organized for citation export. Zotero doesn't work well if you open an external PDF from a website as it cannot pull author information correctly from a PDF source.
Zotero, when paired with the Zotfile plugin, makes it incredibly easy to index sources and documents on a project-by-project basis. Users can store document files locally in a Zotero project filesystem, or merely store links to files stored elsewhere.
Zotero plays extremely nicely with PDF documents, thanks again to the Zotfile plugin: I can highlight sections of a PDF article's text and Zotero indexes these "pull quotes" in a searchable and well-organized manner for easy extraction when it comes time to synthesize my sources into a new paper.
Zotero automates the production of properly-formatted references (including APA, MLA, Chicago, and others), making it a breeze to create accurate and complete bibliographies.
Zotero's library system provides a straightforward graphical user interface to manage multiple research projects and associated files, including the ability to easily add items to a project by ISBN, DOI, PMID, and arXiv IDs.
Zotero is a fantastic software for researchers. We do pay for 6 GB of storage for each user, so their libraries can be backed to the cloud beyond the 300 MB of allowed free storage. It's low-cost, or can be free if you don't opt into that version. No other citation manager comes even close to Zotero in its capabilities, user-friendly nature, and cost, nor do they innovate their features constantly like Zotero and have open source support online
once you adapt to the interface, which could feel a bit outdated and old school, its incredible intuitive. An aesthetic improvement could make it reach a whole other level, just if it does not lose any of its usability features. Its quite intuitive and the learning curve is very short.
Always available. I have it downloaded on my desktop and it opens quickly/immediately, holds open the articles I was reading on the page I was at, and is always ready-to-go for something like Word integration for adding citations
Everything loads shockingly quickly. PDFs open much faster in Zotero than they do in Adobe Acrobat, all changes to PDFs are saved, the citation manager opens relatively quickly in Word, the tool updates with the online Zotero interface and automatically syncs seamlessly
I have never used Zotero support. I can answer the questions I need to from googling or finding others who have asked my same question in the Zotero support community forums
The graphic user interface is beautiful; adding literature to a project is a seamless process, annotations while collaborating are intuitive and sometimes even fun. Competitors might be cheaper but do not consolidate all the tools that ReadCube has been able to achieve.
Zotero is much less prone to glitches than Mendeley, and has much easier to use web extensions and word processor plugins. I found Zotero easy and intuitive to use
All features of Zotero have always worked just fine to me. In my many years using it, I've never run into issues. And when I do want to maximize my use of some feature or learn more, the product support communities are helpful. It's an extremely consistent, reliable software
