JabRef vs Mendeley

ianhoolihan · 2012-08-11 04:32:17

Hi all,

I'm looking for a program for organising my rather large collection of science related textbooks and papers. I've really narrowed it down to Mendeley vs JabRef, and was wondering if anyone could offer some comparison between the two, in the following aspects:

1. I've got a rather old Thinkpad X40 (1Gb RAM, 1.6GHz cpu), so does anyone know what resources these programs use? I'm guessing Mendeley has a bit more bloat, but don't know the numbers.
2. I like the ability to annotate pdfs. Mendeley has this built in, or I can use Xournal with JabRef. What is the annotation like with Mendeley?
3. I envisage they're relatively similar in the services they provide, and useability etc, but maybe you have other comments?

All thoughts appreciated.

Trilby · 2012-08-11 12:38:33

I dabbled with Mendeley a while back, but now use jabref exclusively.

1) I don't have numbers to back it up now, but I believe your suspicion for #1 is correct. I think Mendeley is very well done, but it is a large project that offers all sorts of bells and whistles - lots of options. Jabref is much more slim and comes a little closer to the philosophy of "do one thing and do it well." But the difference between being loaded with features and being full of bloat is only a matter of whether or not you have a use for those features.

2) Jabref allows you to include "notes" in the reference database, but beyond that I don't think it has any annotation features (AFAIK). Jabref will happily link to pdf's that are available, but it is designed as a reference manager first, with the option to link to pdfs. Mendeley (IMHO) felt more like a pdf library first, with the option to maintain references.

3) I never got too familiar with Mendeley, so take this with a large grain of salt, but Mendeley seems popular in the Mac world and appropriately so: it does many things "for you". It automates, runs things in the background, and does much of your thinking for you. If you like software that does this, it does it pretty well. Personally I hate software that does this. I get rid of Mendeley when I realized I was spending too much time turning features OFF or telling it to stop doing something.

In conclusion, jabref was the right fit for me. But if you'd want the options offered by Mendeley, it is a stable, seemingly well written, app.

So as usual: try them both, and see.

Note: as one "criticism" of jabref, its UI is java. I tend to avoid java apps, as I haven't mastered getting the "look and feel" right. In contrast, I'm pretty sure Mendeley uses one of the major toolkits and will look more "native" without a lot of tweaking.

ianhoolihan · 2012-08-11 22:15:47

Trilby wrote:

I dabbled with Mendeley a while back, but now use jabref exclusively.
1) I don't have numbers to back it up now, but I believe your suspicion for #1 is correct. I think Mendeley is very well done, but it is a large project that offers all sorts of bells and whistles - lots of options. Jabref is much more slim and comes a little closer to the philosophy of "do one thing and do it well." But the difference between being loaded with features and being full of bloat is only a matter of whether or not you have a use for those features.
2) Jabref allows you to include "notes" in the reference database, but beyond that I don't think it has any annotation features (AFAIK). Jabref will happily link to pdf's that are available, but it is designed as a reference manager first, with the option to link to pdfs. Mendeley (IMHO) felt more like a pdf library first, with the option to maintain references.
3) I never got too familiar with Mendeley, so take this with a large grain of salt, but Mendeley seems popular in the Mac world and appropriately so: it does many things "for you". It automates, runs things in the background, and does much of your thinking for you. If you like software that does this, it does it pretty well. Personally I hate software that does this. I get rid of Mendeley when I realized I was spending too much time turning features OFF or telling it to stop doing something.
In conclusion, jabref was the right fit for me. But if you'd want the options offered by Mendeley, it is a stable, seemingly well written, app.
So as usual: try them both, and see.
Note: as one "criticism" of jabref, its UI is java. I tend to avoid java apps, as I haven't mastered getting the "look and feel" right. In contrast, I'm pretty sure Mendeley uses one of the major toolkits and will look more "native" without a lot of tweaking.

Thanks a bunch for that thorough reply. The main point you've mentioned (which I agree with) is that Mendeley is a bit more bloated, and does lots of things in the background etc. Hence, I'll go ahead and give JabRef a try, and see how it goes. Hopefully I can use it as a "library" of sorts.

Cheers.

cfr · 2012-08-12 00:21:21

I'm just thinking about trying Mendeley but more for its library/browsing/searching etc. features than reference management. All my references are in .bib files and I really don't like programmes which mess up my custom formatting! (And all reference management software I've seen seems to want to manage .bib files its own way.) Though it would be lovely if something could search and insert keys into kile without messing with the database files themselves...

I've tried JabRef in the past and didn't like it. But java programmes tend to run horribly on Macs so maybe it works better on Linux.

I get the impression that Mendeley is something like Papers, if that helps. (I've never used either so it doesn't help me much.) Whereas JabRef is more akin to things like BibDesk etc. (That's Mac only, I know, but I haven't tried the Linux ones.)

lifeafter2am · 2012-08-12 00:47:29

Way back when I was in academia I used a Mac and got really accustomed to Papers. Then when I came back to PCs (and Linux), I needed something to organize all the research articles I had. I ended up going with Mendeley. I liked that it let me share papers with my colleagues, and I liked that it backed up all my pdfs to the site. This also meant that when I was working in a lab not my own, I could easily get on any computer there and pull up my articles. But more important than that was that it let me easily organize and tag references for the different papers I was writing. I knew, very easily, which articles I was referencing in each of my various papers, which made it easy to go back and re-read papers that were being used in that paper.

I needed something that was full featured, so I went with Mendeley. I can't speak to JabRef, as I have never personally used it.

Arch Linux

#1 2012-08-11 04:32:17

JabRef vs Mendeley

#2 2012-08-11 12:38:33

Re: JabRef vs Mendeley

#3 2012-08-11 22:15:47

Re: JabRef vs Mendeley

#4 2012-08-12 00:21:21

Re: JabRef vs Mendeley

#5 2012-08-12 00:47:29

Re: JabRef vs Mendeley

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