Watch for our summer 2011 workshops on Mendeley which, in our view, is one of the better services to organize research and store documents online. Among its strengths, Mendeley facilitates social networking and collaboration within pre-defined research networks. It features other researchers’ private and public journal collections and is viewed as more impressive in functionality than Zotero. Here’s Mendeley’s blog and a 2010 review.
RefWorks Mendeley Zotero
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Yvonne Chan
lse721
Nice work.
As I’ve remarked on prior versions of this – Mendeley and Zotero use the exact same citation styles and thus have the exact same number of citation styles available – which is actually about 300 different styles covering around 2000 different publications – it makes no sense having different entries for the two in that box.
The “format references” box is a bit confusing, too – both Zotero and Mendeley have CWYW plugins for word and open office – any other regular text editor, including google docs or html is mainly supported via copy&paste of bibliographies or individual citations – Zotero has, in additin, an rtf-scan features that will recognize citations in { } and format them automatically, but that feature isn’t working very well atm (don’t know if Mendeley has anything in this direction) – it’s worth making a distinction between these types of integration.
Why you label Mendeley’s web scraping “excellent,” while Zotero’s is merely “good for html” I don’t understand – Zotero has a much larger set of translators retrieving quality data not just from academic sources, but also a broad range of newspapers, blogs, and magazines. Where no translator is present the two programs do the same thing.
Finally, there is a standalone version of Zotero, currently in alpha, so it’s not limited to Firefox. Moreover, even if you’re not using the standalone, you can use the plugins for chrome and safari to create items in your (FF-based) Zotero database.
Thanks Adam. I’m make those changes. Dean
oh also, while I’m here – the info on the wiki on how Zotero gets meta-data from pdfs is incorrect. It doesn’t look at the XMP. Instead, it looks inside the pdf, if it finds a DOI it looks up the information on crossref. If it doesn’t, it looks up some sentences on google scholar. That’s why the results are quite similar to Mendeley’s overall.
Hi Dean,
As Community Lead at Zotero, wanted to commend adam.smith and reiterate that he’s on the mark there.
Thanks for offering to make changes to the document!
If you have further questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch or post to the forums. Also following zotero.org/blog or subscribing to the newsletter is a good way to keep up with updates to Zotero.
-Debbie
http://www.zotero.org/styles now gives a count of the number of CSL 1.0 styles available (1550 as of this moment, of which 345 are unique).
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Not a fair comparison now that RefWorks has a 2.0 version out, which to my mind far surpasses the previous version. Its Write N Cite is still in its old form, but I hear that’s being updated soon also.
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