If you don’t want to read a lot, just jump to the summary Costs, Openness, Freedom and Sustainability.All reviewed reference tools offer lots of functions, and it might be that we missed one during our review. If you feel that one of the mentioned features is particularly important to you, install the tools yourself, compare the features, and share your insights in the comments! Most importantly, please let us know when something we wrote is not correct. So, consider this review as a rough guideline. Of course, a more comprehensive list of features and a more sophisticated rating scheme would have been nice, but this would have been too time consuming. Please note that we only compared about 50 high-level features and used a simple rating scheme in the summary table. However, this comparison is most certainly more objective than those that Mendeley and other reference managers did -). You are very welcome to share your constructive criticism in the comments, as well as links to other reviews. In addition, it should be obvious that we – the developers of Docear – are somewhat biased. However, even if you disagree with our evaluation, you might find at least some new and interesting aspects as to evaluate reference management tools. Of course, the criteria are subjectively selected, as are all criteria by all reviewers, and you might not agree with all of them. Hopefully, we can include them in the comparison some day, but for now we only have time to compare the three. We really tried to do a fair comparison, based on a list of criteria that we consider important for reference management software. Of course, there are many other reference managers. In this Blog-post, we compare Zotero, Mendeley, and Docear and we hope that the comparison helps you to decide which of the reference managers is best for you.

Actually, there is no such thing as the ‘best’ reference manager but only the reference manager that is best for you (even though some developers seem to believe that their tool is the only truly perfect one). So, which reference manager is best? Zotero? Mendeley? Docear? …? The answer is: “It depends”, because different people have different needs.

Which one is the best reference management software? That’s a question any student or researcher should think about quite carefully, because choosing the best reference manager may save lots of time and increase the quality of your work significantly.

Endnote basic vs mendeley