Open-source Mendeley alternatives

Zotero is a free tool for managing research. It collects references as you browse the web, organizes them into collections with tags and saved searches, and helps you annotate, cite and share them. It is available for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android, and the source code in this repository is open.

A browser connector senses research material on sites it recognizes and saves it with a click. Citations and bibliographies can be generated for any text editor and directly inside Word, LibreOffice and Google Docs, with support for over 9,000 citation styles. A companion web tool, ZoteroBib, creates quick bibliographies without installing anything.

Syncing across devices is optional, and synced data can also be reached from a web browser. Libraries can be shared in groups, for co-writing a paper, distributing course materials or building a collaborative bibliography, with no limit on how many people join at no cost. The site also offers paid storage upgrades for synced files.

JabRef is an open-source, cross-platform desktop application for managing bibliographies and citations, with native BibTeX and BibLaTeX support. It helps researchers collect and organize sources, find papers they need and keep up with new research, and it is free of charge.

For collecting, it searches online catalogs such as CrossRef, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, PubMed and arXiv, imports from more than fifteen reference formats, fetches complete records from an ISBN, DOI, PubMed ID or arXiv ID, extracts metadata from PDFs, and offers a browser extension for one-click imports. For organizing, it provides hierarchical groups, keyword-based organization, duplicate detection, a customizable citation key generator, and rules that rename and move linked files.

For citing, it supports cite-as-you-write workflows with external editors and tools such as Emacs, Kile, LyX, Texmaker, TeXstudio, Vim and WinEdt. JabRef is written in Java with JavaFX and released under the MIT license, and its repository also lists AI and OCR among its topics.