Mendeley vs Zotero
Previously I posted about Zotero, and I am using Zotero primarily in my academic study. At the same time, I used Mendeley to manage all the PDF files that I am studying. Recently, I found that inserting new citation in my document using Zotero is a little bit slower (too many references), and at the same time I need to use Mendeley to read the journal articles and search for the text. Therefore, I was wondering whether can I depend on Mendeley only, so that I need not to use Zotero together. So, I converted my document manually and change the citation to Mendley. Then I discovered the following feature differences:
| Mendeley | Zotero | |
|---|---|---|
| Save to library from web browser | Using bookmarklet. Allow to save PDF to the library depending on the sites. I found that it may miss some authors, or wrong item type. | Firefox addon. Chrome/Safari extension connected to Zotero Standalone. There is bookmarklet. Using bookmarklet can save the PDF to the cloud storage, but not local computer. I found that the saved items are more complete and more accurate than Mendeley |
| Can search and view the text in the PDF, integrated to Mendeley Desktop | Cannot search the text in the PDF | |
| Citation detection in document | Can detect new citation, and allows to insert into library. | Cannot. |
| Insert citation in document | Mendeley Desktop will grab the focus and the window will on top of the document, makes me cannot read the text. | Zotero will popup a small bar to insert the citation. |
| LibreOffice extension toolbar | Cannot hide the label. | Can hide the label. |
| Quota | 2GB | 300MB |
Because of limited quota, that is why I avoid saving PDF to the Zotero. Mendeley is able to integrate with Zotero. I have not try this feature, not sure whether it is good or bad. And I also found that, inserting Zotero citation is faster than Mendeley. But Mendeley has a very good feature to detect the citations in the document (I think that is why it is slower).