If all goes well I plan to start on a PhD in the next few months. I need to sort out a reference manager.
1) As a reference manager are there strong reasons to choose Mendeley over Zotero? I love the GUI of Mendeley over all other reference managers I have tried. But I am not sure whether Mendeley being owned by a private company that deals with journal articles is a positive thing. They pretty much have access to all our research-related data we store on Mendeley!
2) Is the syncing automatic? If I go home from office without syncing would the new updates not show in my home computer? Do I have to manually press the sync button each time?
3) In Mendeley when syncing is carried, are the contents of Notes and Private Annotations also synced? They do not seem to sync in the multiple devices I have.
4) In Mendeley is there a plug-in that would enhance the features of Notes and Private Annotations? The former only seems to have Bold, Italics and Underline functions which is not enough and the latter not even that!
5) In Mendeley, is it possible to export the contents of Notes written in the collection of PDFs as a batch i.e. from all PDFs?
6) In Mendeley, is it possible to export the contents of Private Annotations as a batch? I know it is possible to do this one-by-one but that is not helpful when there are heaps of PDFs though.
7) Is there anyway to have a mind-mapping tool integrated to Mendeley? In order to go from managing articles + making notes to formal writing I need a visual middle-man so I can organise my research writing and jot down ideas and have a look at how everything fits in before I actually start formal writing. Any software that would help me do this please? I tried Qiqqa and Docear - they both have the functions I need but their GUI is user-unfriendly and ugly!
Thanks very much in advance :)
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