Digital Science company ReadCube now offers Papers, a reference management application.
$36
per user
Zotero
Score 9.1 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.
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
