Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer

I've been looking for a replacement for Papers for years; it just doesn't work well anymore with the lack of attention they've given it since the acquisition. For me subscription pricing is a no-go. It's sad, I would happily pay for a new standalone Papers...

It is a good idea to get some Zotero cloud storage. The sync works perfectly for me. Since any serious library will be over the Mendeley free limit, I think it's a fair comparision.

Of course Zoteros development is less funded and less agile. Given that, I think they have worked on many shortcomings. The interface is now good, the group-based sharing works, PDFs are read and meta-data is added well. The import plugin is better than that of Mendeley.

Mendeley has an advantage in that it has a great PDF viewer and editor. But since you can not do anything with these PDFs and annotations, like export them or send them anywhere, it's now pretty much useless.

Switching is not easy, but in the long run I don't think you'd be faced with much issues going from Mendeley to Zotero. It was certainly worth it for me.

As it stands, you can still import from Mendeley to Zotero, so I'd at least do that now, until Elsevier finds a way to shut this down completely.

It's not so much the lock-in issue, or the migration issue for me. I can pay for a good service, Mendeley used to be that, cause this is my job.

The issue is that due to Elsevier, a DRM logic was implemented that just doesn't make sense for scientists. The idea is that I can tell you about a paper, but you have to download it yourself because I can not send it to you. I can annotate the PDF, but I can not send you the annotated PDF. We have to look at the same screen to see what I wrote.

That end result means that Mendeley is no longer a good product. It makes scientific collaboration difficult to impossible. Sharing of files, ideas, results and writing is such a basic thing in todays world, that you should really be surprised how a company would think that this is a good idea, especially for scientists who almost always collaborate in loose teams.

But that is was happened, because Elsevier only makes money if the only place you can get any PDFs is their DRM walled garden.

So Mendeley is now bad. And NOW it matters that you can not get your data out of it. And the thing is, these annotations and folder categories, tags and meta-data - that's all specific to one researcher. It can not be replicated. It could be years of work in that database, and Mendeley holds it hostage.

Never heard of it before!

Looking at their website, it does seem like Citationsy is somewhere in-between a full-blown reference management application and one-off bibliography creation applications.

What Citationsy does not appear to do is manage inline citations within a Word or Google Docs document. Zotero will let you hit a keyboard shortcut, search for a reference, and insert a citation right in a paragraph (e.g. "(Smith, 2001)") . It then takes care of also adding that citation to the bibliography at the bottom of the document, and keeping the numbering in sync (if your citation style uses numbering).

I would only use a reference manager that has a word processor plugin for inline citation management -- and it doesn't look like Citationsy does.

To quickly build a bibliography, or just get a properly formatted citation for a single paper, I like https://zbib.org (also from Zotero).

Edit: clever, clever, parent poster is the creator of Citationsy. Hello! For more backstory on Citationsy see https://blog.prototypr.io/on-citationsy-4e143bbafc04. Sounds like Cenk has good taste (mentions iA Writer as inspiration). I'll be exploring Citationsy more.

Anyone else here use Jabref? I like it's simplicity.