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Mendeley

Mendeley

Overview

What is Mendeley?

Mendeley, an Elsevier company headquartered in London, offers their eponymous reference management software suite, including Mendeley Reference Manager, Web Importer, the Citation Plugin add-on, available in Premium package.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Convenient and Easy to Use: Many users have found Mendeley to be a convenient and easy way to organize their research into one system. …
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Mendeley = Mostly Okay

7 out of 10
October 27, 2020
Incentivized
As a graduate student, I use Mendeley both individually, managing references for my own research, and as part of a group of 4-5 research …
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Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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What is Mendeley?

Mendeley, an Elsevier company headquartered in London, offers their eponymous reference management software suite, including Mendeley Reference Manager, Web Importer, the Citation Plugin add-on, available in Premium package.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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What is EndNote?

Clarivate Analytics headquartered in Philadelphia offers EndNote, a reference library and management software. Endnote helps users save time, stay organized, collaborate with colleagues, and get published.

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Product Details

What is Mendeley?

Mendeley Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(21)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Convenient and Easy to Use: Many users have found Mendeley to be a convenient and easy way to organize their research into one system. They appreciate the software's affordability and the benefits it offers. Some users mention that Mendeley is super easy to use, making it accessible for both beginners and experienced researchers.

Effective Interface for Organization: Users like the clean interface of Mendeley, which they find effective for organizing their research materials. The ability to import reference libraries from other management software is particularly appreciated. Some users mention that the software's synchronization features, web-based importer, and Microsoft Word plugin make it a helpful tool for organizing references for class work and research projects.

Smooth Handling of Citations and References: Users find that Mendeley works well when switching between different computers while working on the same document. They also mention that it handles manual edits to citations and references smoothly. The automatic finding and populating of references online by Mendeley makes it easier to create bibliographies, saving time for users.

Crashes and Syncing Issues: Many users have reported frequent crashes and syncing issues with Mendeley, which can be frustrating and hinder collaboration. These issues have been mentioned by a significant number of reviewers, causing inconvenience for them.

Confusing User Interface: Some users find the user interface of Mendeley confusing, making tasks difficult to complete. This has been a common complaint among users who struggle to navigate the software effectively.

Limited Citation Formats for Humanities: Users in the humanities field have expressed dissatisfaction with Mendeley's limited citation formats for their specific needs. Several reviewers have highlighted this as a drawback of the software, limiting its usefulness in their academic work.

Users frequently recommend using the Mendeley desktop client instead of the web version for enhanced efficiency in organizing and managing research papers. They also suggest exploring the different features of Mendeley through tutorials or documentation to fully benefit from its capabilities, particularly in reference formatting. Trying out multiple citation software tools, such as Mendeley, Zotero, and RefWorks, is advised to find the most suitable one. Additionally, users highly recommend utilizing the Mendeley plugin for word processing software. Overall, Mendeley is highly regarded by users for its user-friendly interface and valuable features in research paper organization and management.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-6 of 6)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
January 10, 2024

Time to switch gears

Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We used to use Mendeley to handle our literature review and share notes
  • Search in pdf (former version, not current)
  • Search in pdf (does not exist in current version)
  • Don't lock your annotations within their proprietary format
  • Offline use (does not exist in current version)
  • Support and answer to users
Mendeley Desktop used to be a decent software, and comparatively one of the best among Reference Managers.
The new online version is beyond expectations.
Franklin Linam | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I and my coworkers have used Mendeley to manage scientific research paper references and citations. It allows generation of properly formatted citations with a Word plugin which saves much time.
  • It is free
  • It has available citation styles for every journal
  • It allows reading of papers along with citing them
  • In my opinion, terrible web-based function in the new version
  • Very difficult to annotate and search in PDF's
  • New version removed many previous functions
Mendeley was an easy-to-use free reference manager which integrates seamlessly with Word. It is great for exporting formatted citations and for converting from different citation styles easily. The new version is web-based, however, which means unless you open all your files of interest and sign in before leaving WiFi connection, you cannot work offline (even though the PDF's are downloaded locally). In my opinion, the new version also makes it much more difficult to annotate papers and the search function is essentially useless because it no longer searches through text within files but only in the title, authors, journal, etc. fields. Because it is now entirely web-based, anytime their website has issues, you cannot access your papers and citations, which means you can't work on writing your thesis, which is why I am writing this review right now. Overall, Mendeley used to be a great free option with good functionality, but Elsevier has decided to remove functions with newer versions of the software.
Diego Fernando Martínez Ayala | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Mendeley is used daily in our Research Department, initially for organizing external references, for sharing them, and most of the work in Mendeley is for annotating and extracting information. Also, once we are writing our content, we always come back to Mendeley to create references and properly maintain our Bibliography. Outside of our work unit, nobody else uses it within our organization.
  • Organizing references
  • Sharing references
  • Annotating documents
  • Summary capabilities for non research personnel
  • Getting documents from watch folders automatically
Mendeley is perfect for organizing your research, for reading and annotating documents. If your team is exclusively research staff, you will get most of the tool. Still, if you need to share your knowledge with non-research personnel, Mendeley is not that appropriate because it will be too complex and confusing for them.
October 27, 2020

Mendeley = Mostly Okay

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As a graduate student, I use Mendeley both individually, managing references for my own research, and as part of a group of 4-5 research staff. I've used Mendeley to manage >800 citations across the systematic review pipeline -- from downloading titles and abstracts, screening titles and abstracts using multiple reviewers (though group folders), and ultimately full-text review and markup. I also used Mendeley for a range of academic work to archive and index my needed sources.
  • Easy to use interface
  • The use of font size and style makes information easily discoverable within the article previews
  • Drag-and-drop functions make article indexing particularly simple
  • Syncing errors when using multiple devices occur infrequently (but still too often), leading to lost work and retrieved articles
  • Mendeley's servers sometimes are down, which prevents group work from being conducted on multiple machines through group folders
If you are planning on using a citation manager on a single device for solo citation management, Mendeley is perfectly suited to your needs. If you need to do work on multiple machines or as part of a collaboration, I think Mendeley has some work to do before it is right for you.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Mendeley is used to organize our research. We provide forensic evaluations for the courts and saving and organizing research articles to be placed in the back of our bibliography section is required. Mendeley can be added as an add-in into Microsoft Word and also easily copied into the correct reference format, saving us time and headache.
  • Easily works with Word
  • Importing different reference formats
  • Organization
  • Finding relevant references
  • Some bugs noted with Word, especially when tables are included, had to uninstall add-in from Word for the tables to work correctly.
  • Finding books for research and being able to place the titles as references. We can import them from other sources, however, working, for instance, in conjunction with Google, would help to gather citations from other relevant work other than journal articles.
It has saved our company time and resources by organizing all relevant citations for us. It is helpful for those wishing to organize their citations and to quickly copy the citations into the body of your work.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Used by our department at this time. Used by employees who are involved in research to store, organize and easily access research articles for various projects.
  • Organize articles
  • Insert references in manuscript
  • Create Bibliography
  • Resolving duplication of articles
  • Extract information from websites
It is useful for individual researchers to organize, sort and reference relevant articles for a project and insert references and bibliography that adjusts with adjustment of text in a manuscript.

Also useful for multiple researchers to collaborate and share articles and references and sort information
May not be as useful for small scale case reports
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