Table 1.

Comparison of various reference manager softwares outlining different features available

Programs		Papers	Mendeley	EndNote	RefWorks	Zotero
General Comparison of products	Basic software package	$79.00	Free	$250	$100	Free
	Free web storage space	NA	1 GB	1 GB	NA	100 MB
	Premium software package	NA	4.00–9.99/month	NA	NA	1.67–20.00/month
Reference and Document Management	Organization of PDFs and other documents	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
	Citation plug-ins for Word	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Citation plug-ins for Open Office	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
	Annotations/highlighting in PDFs	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
	Cross-platform synching across desktop, web, and mobile devices	No	Yes	No	No	Yes
Knowledge discovery	Free and open database approaching 100 million documents	No	Yes	No	No	No
	Personalized paper recommendations	No	Yes	No	No	No
	Readership statistics and community tags	No	Yes	No	No	No
	Open Web API	No	Yes	No	No	Yes
	Full text search across all your papers	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
	Search across external databases	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No
Collaboration	Private groups	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Public groups	No	Yes	No	No	Yes
	Social network	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes
	Collaboration newsfeed	No	Yes	No	No	Yes
General technology	Web app	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Desktop app	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
	Compatibility with all modern web browsers	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No
	Compatibility with Mac/Win/Linux	No	Yes	No	No	Yes
	Mobile and iPad	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
	Product feedback forum	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
	Library systems integration/EZproxy Support	Yes	No (almost there)	Yes	Yes	Yes
Metadata extraction technology	Extraction of DOI from PDFs	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Extraction of PubMed IDs and ArXiv IDs from PDFs	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes
	Extraction of embedded metadata from PDFs	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
	Extraction of citation from PDFs without embedded metadata	No	Yes	No	No	Yes