TrustRadius Insights for Mendeley are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
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.
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.
Pros
It is free
It has available citation styles for every journal
It allows reading of papers along with citing them
Cons
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
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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.
Pros
Organizing references
Sharing references
Annotating documents
Cons
Summary capabilities for non research personnel
Getting documents from watch folders automatically
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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.
Pros
Easily works with Word
Importing different reference formats
Organization
Finding relevant references
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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.
Pros
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
Cons
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
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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.
Pros
Organize articles
Insert references in manuscript
Create Bibliography
Cons
Resolving duplication of articles
Extract information from websites
Likelihood to Recommend
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
