RefWorks, Zotero, Mendeley: How to choose: RefWorks, Zotero AND/OR Mendeley?

RefWorks -- an online research management, writing and collaboration tool -- is designed to help researchers easily gather, manage, store and share all types of information, as well as generate citations and bibliographies.

16 reasons to choose RefWorks

• Downloading and Storing Research
• Access the program from anywhere at any time
• Works with any platform
• Works on mobile interfaces
• One-Click Export from Hundreds of Databases
• RefWorks stores and organizes all forms of information: text citations,graphics, video, sound, etc
  
  

• Sharing and Collaboration
• The RefShare feature enables users to share information with collaborators and co-workers regardless of whether they subscribe
  to RefWorks.

• Organise your research
• Creating Folders: moving and removing references
  
• Viewing, Sorting and Printing References
• Editing Multiple References
• My List
• Checking for Duplicates

• Citations and Bibliographies
• RefWorks bibliographic management system incorporates an online style guide within the program
• The AccuCite feature allows users to pick a potential output style when entering or editing references
  
  

• RefWorks Support
• RefWorks support team are available by email, by phone, or online to quickly solve any issues users might encounter
• Lifelong Access
• Free Training
• Its multi-lingual interface enables researchers to use RefWorks in the preferred language
• Working Offline

Zotero: pronounced [zoh-TAIR-oh]. Albanian word for "to acquire, to master"

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.

• Your Research content is diverse

• Downloading and Storing Research: PDFs, images, audio and video files, snapshots of web pages, and really anything else
• Easy to gather citation records from databases, catalogues and websites
• Zotero's single click capture
  
• Synchronizes your data across as many devices as you choose: All of your notes, files, and bibliographic data remain seamlessly up to date

• Sharing and Collaboration
  
• Share your own work or sources with others who are working in related areas.
• Collaborate with colleagues, publicly or privately, on ongoing research.
• Discover other people with similar interests and the sources they are citing: browse for people by discipline
• Zotero groups can be private or public, open or closed.

• Organise your Research
• Sort into any number of named collections and subcollections
• Organise collections like iTunes playlists
• Assign tags to organise your research with your own keywords

• Citations and Bibliographies
• Create footnotes, endnotes, in-text citations or bibliographies
• in Word and OpenOffice
• Powerful and flexible Citation Style Language for all publication formats and styles

Mendeley is a free online service that allows you to index and organize your PDF documents, collaborate with fellow researchers and share information via shared and public collections, and discover new research through the Mendeley research network.

You can create reference lists and bibliographies in Word (Windows only) or OpenOffice (all platforms).

• Free software/web hybrid for PC, Mac, Linux
• Organizes and manages the pdfs that are already on your computer
• Introduces social networking tools to collaborate with fellow researchers, including sharing lists of references and collaborative tagging of documents
• Sync PDFs to your web account for access to them anywhere you are online
• Annotate PDFs
• Search within the text of all of your PDFs
• Good way to capture citations from the PDFs on your computer and export them into EndNote

Interesting fact: Mendeley was founded in November 2007 by three German PhD students based in London. When Elsevier purchased Mendeley in 2013, it created a fuss on scientific networks and media. It also opened up the scope for Open Access (the huge collaboration features)