Citation Management and Integration with Microsoft Word

[cgibso05 9]

Hi All,

I am a graduate student working on a research thesis and I have enjoyed using Evernote to take notes as I read through journal articles for my literature review. 

I also use Mendeley as my citation manager, it is great for managing all of my different sources and makes inserting in-text citations and creating my reference list efficient as it has Microsoft Word integration.

That being said, I often find myself having to flip back and forth between the two programs to make sure I am referencing the information in the notes that I have taken correctly. It also means I need to enter in (some) reference information twice (at least so I can recognize the source) - once in Mendeley and again in Evernote to track where the notes that I am taking are coming from (I don't like to create a new note for each reference, so I can't just put it in the title of the note).

A new feature suggestion to add to Evernote (which, I'm sure has already been suggested) would be some sort of citation management capability with Word integration. I am envisioning a feature that would have some type of process flow such that if you wanted to take notes for a specific school report, paper, research assignment, project, or in my case, thesis, that required you to use several sources you could create something like a notebook, lets call it a 'source folder' that would let you enter in reference information for all of the sources you have related to that assignment and, when you click the reference, a notepad window appears so your notes and citations could be stored together.

Something like the Mendeley UI, (which, actually, allows you to take notes of a particular reference by clicking the tab adjacent to 'details'...and also allows you to put your sources into 'folders' for different projects) but with all of the features that Evernote has that I have come to know and love as my preferred note-taking platform.

I think if Evernote created a citation manager feature it would add to its completeness as a note-taking app and would add significant value to students. 

Also, if done right, I am assuming there is a huge user base to tap into for all the people who use citation managers but don't use Evernote. The current citation management software available to choose from isn't all that great (in my opinion), so I bet it would be easy to steal users.

Thoughts?

[Mariusz Matusiak 4]

+1 for this suggestions as it mostly covers my desire for this software.

I also use Mendeley, and I found it very useful for its main purpose which is reference management. It has tags, you can search through contents of PDFs, you have different styles of citations and web browser and MS Word plugins (no such thing for LaTeX, but at least I can export my bibliography and handle the rest in VS Code editor).
However, Mendeley lacks some good approach to make notes. You can highlight PDF content, provide some notes per each paper, but not provide more general ones for multiple papers. I think there is no point for Evernote to be another reference manager but It would be great to have some sort of synchronization option between Evernote and Mendeley/Zotero. Right now I configured my Mendeley instance to save all the PDFs I collected on Google Drive which is also connected to Evernote. But this only allows me to synchronize original PDFs without highlights and notes I made in Mendeley.

[Felix388 0]

+1

[NatalieCM 0]

Emphatic +1! 

[CodeMunkee 0]

+1