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Decreased functionality since becoming web-based
April 18, 2023

Decreased functionality since becoming web-based

Franklin Linam | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Mendeley

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
  • Reference management
  • Paper annotation
  • Citation formatting
  • Saves time when submitting papers to different journals
  • Organizing references from different topics/projects
  • Annotating papers

Do you think Mendeley delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Mendeley's feature set?

No

Did Mendeley live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Mendeley go as expected?

No

Would you buy Mendeley again?

No

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.