Open Source Mendeley Alternatives
A curated collection of the 1 best open source alternatives to Mendeley.
The best open source alternative to Mendeley is Zotero. If that doesn't suit you, we've compiled a ranked list of other open source Mendeley alternatives to help you find a suitable replacement.
Mendeley alternatives are mainly Note Taking & Knowledge Management. Browse these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of Mendeley.
A free reference manager that collects sources while you browse, organizes and annotates them, and generates citations in over 9,000 styles.
Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. The gap it closes sits between reading and writing, where citations are otherwise retyped by hand and a whole bibliography is rebuilt every time a journal asks for a different style.
Collection happens while you browse. Zotero recognizes research material on the page, whether that is a paper on JSTOR or arXiv, a news article or a library record, and saves it with its metadata attached. What lands in the library can then be annotated, sorted and cited without leaving the tool.
Zotero covers the whole path from source to bibliography.
- Organization: collections, keyword tags and saved searches that fill themselves as new items match.
- Word processor plugins: citations and bibliographies inserted from Microsoft Word, LibreOffice and Google Docs.
- Citation styles: over 9,000 of them, so changing journal is a change of setting.
- Syncing: optional synchronization keeping the library consistent across devices and browsers.
- Group libraries: free shared libraries to co-write a paper with a colleague, distribute course materials to students, or build a collaborative bibliography.
Zotero runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. It is developed by Digital Scholar, a nonprofit, and being open source it leaves your data under your own control rather than turning it into a product. ZoteroBib covers the lighter case of building one bibliography with no library behind it, and support runs through the Zotero forums.
