EndNote

Endnote is provided by my university for free. I enjoy Endnote very much. It does everything I expect for reference management software.

simple and great

Endnote is the best reference manager for Word, albeit it is also the most expensive. Yet, among all the Clarivate's products it is the least expensive. The worst part about Endnote is that it you will loose all your pdf attachments soon after you get ca. 4000-5000 of them. And neither yourself nor Endnote techsupport will be able to recover them .

I have been using Endnote for 7 years. I don't really want to.

Endnote...

• is brutally expensive (unless you have a site licence through work, forget it)
• has no Linux version (that's a disgrace!)
• has buggy integration with Open/Libre Office
• allows unparalleled citation & bibliography customization - huge feature set**
• takes quite a while to learn all the options, the more advanced options aren't intuitive to navigate

For 90% of people Zotero or Mendeley will be as useful. Both are free. Both work on Mac, Windows and Linux.

For LaTeX users, there is JabRef.

** Example of a feature Endnote feature others don't have: Composite references: the option to group references cited together as 1) a)..., b)..., c)... rather than 1)..., 2)..., 3)... (ie multiple references under one number in the bibliography, rather than one reference per number). Don't feel you need that? No, I didn't think so. It seems to be part of publishing culture only for some areas of law and organic and inorganic chemistry. And that's what I mean: thoughtful to include it, and frustrating if you need it and don't get it with the free alternatives like Mendeley. The good community of Zotero don't even understand what this feature is and why people would want it. But if you don't need this level of customization, congratulations. Probably you don't need EndNote.

EndNote is foisted upon thousands of academics through expensive contracts that their home institutions are used to paying. But the world of reference managers has undergone a revolution in the last five years and EndNote has stayed behind as a desktop-based monolith that has never quite embraced the internet and the changing workflows of academics.

I happen to have written a post about "Zotero, an EndNote alternative" three years ago. Still now, every month hundreds of visitors arrive on my blog via the search term "endnote alternative". This means EndNote is in deep trouble. For me, a believer in the power of open source, it is a vivid display of how commercial monopoly can lead to clogged software that has to be protected by lawsuits against the true innovators. So my advise is: stay away from it, and check out the alternatives!

Very useful for managing references, and luckily I have access to it for my use through the university I attend, so I don't have to foot the bill for it. Indispensable when writing up a large paper.