Mendeley

I have been doing a bit of a comparison between Mendeley and Papers recently because I haven't used Endnote for a while, actually since my last post on Reference managers. People suggected Zotero and EndnoteWeb to me, but I didn't like either of them.

I must say, I really love Mendeley as a social tool. It is great to be able to share pdfs with collaborators and to be able to access my references as easily at home and at work, especially since I have a PC at home and a mac at work.
Creating collections with all the associated metadata for publications is great. I haven't yet used the word plugin, so I will let you know shortly what I think of that. The down side with Mendeley is that you only have 500Mb of space online at the moment.

Papers is cool too, especially the fact that you don't need to open up a pdf reader as a separate program, you can do Google Scholar, ISI, Pubmed etc searches within Papers and automatically download pdfs if your instituion has access. You can highlight words in the pdf and do searches on those or highlight the doi and get all the associated metadata. Unfortunately, it only works and macs and doesn't have all the social networking aspect that Mendeley has.

Endnote, Connotea and GoogleScholar

What's good about Endnote:
It helps to format bibliographies in 100s of different styles
It provides easy access to your bibliography
What's bad:
What's the point of downloading stuff to Endnote, it takes for ever. Wouldn't it be best to leave it on the web.
It's a pain to sort your bibliography, you end up with loads of different libraries and often want to merge libraries or split them.
It's a pain to add book references as you usually have to do it manually or any other non-journal references for that matter.

What's good about Connotea:
Easy to add new references, you just need a doi or URL.
You can reference anything that is on the web.
You can tag your references and see you else (how many other people) have that reference in their bibliography
You can find out about popular topics really quickly
You can add other peoples references to your bibliography
What's bad:
It doesn't enable you to use your references in your manuscript, you first need to download them to your reference manager

What's good about GoogleScholar:
You can easily get access to references and the associated pdf
Easy search for words, sentences
Books and books sections are available as well as reports etc..
Duplicated articles on the web are removed through clustering
What'bad:
You can't make your own library of interesting articles
You can''t use the references to add into your manuscript
You can't download the references

What do we need?
We need to find some way of sharing our bibliographies on the web (like connotea) so that people can avoid having to type in references manually (which is often necessary for book references in Endnote) and at the same time avoid having duplications of the same reference (like GoogleScholar clusters) and crucially be able to insert a reference from the web directly into our manuscript whilst writing without having to worry about downloading it to our reference manager, because there will only be one reference manager for everybody which will be on the web shared with everybody and tagged diffeently by all the different users.
I can't imagine this being to complicated to do, not that I would know how to do it. The most important thing would be to create a tool that can be added to Word or LateX that enables the linking to the web reference manager and formats the reference section of our manuscript according to all the different formats used by the journals.