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by carbocation 2704 days ago
Good idea re: giving context as to what these programs are. For most of us who do research, these programs are essentially interchangeable "reference managers." Here's what I mean:

I read a scientific paper or look up a citation. I add that with a click or two to my reference manager. It also stores the PDF for me.

In the future, I can easily re-read the PDF. I can annotate it and the annotations will be stored.

Critically, when writing my own paper, I can import those citations and trivially change the format to whatever the publisher wants without any effort.

To me, across most features, these two programs do exactly the same thing. When picking a citation manager, it's more about which one I trust will be around for the long haul and will not interfere with my research.
2 comments
zwaps 2704 days ago
The only difference is that Mendeley has a built-in PDF viewer with annotation. Of course since you can no longer share these annotations, nor export the pdf, that's all pointless.

Mendeley opens PDFs externally, but many PDF readers can create and save annotations.

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carbocation 2704 days ago
In your second paragraph I think you mean to lead with "Zotero" instead of "Mendeley." And yes, I agree with that distinction. In practice, it hasn't been much of a problem (even though I do my work across OS X and Linux).
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henriquemaia 2704 days ago
On your second paragraph you meant Zotero. I just added this comment to make yours more clear.
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boyband6666 2704 days ago
I think you meant to say "when my paper is rejected, I can trivially change the format of references to whatever the publisher of my second choice journal wants without any effort" ;-)
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carbocation 2704 days ago
Ha! Actually, I use this so that while I write my papers, I can use a format where I can see the first author's name and the publication year (which is meaningful when I glance at it). Then, when I submit, I can quickly put it into the format that the publisher wants, which seems to generally be numeric (and meaningless). But, hey, I won't complain about anything that lessens the pain of rejection :)
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