Mendeley Desktop

I've been a loyal user of EndNote in my uni years and it was a program that was easy enough to manipulate. However, the biggest problem I had with it was portability. I could not transfer libraries easily between machines or share my documents such that the references will not change in a different PC.

I've long since graduated and no longer have access to a free source of EndNote so I started looking for alternatives.

Mendeley Desktop solved all my problems. Not only could I work on my paper from the office and my home, I did not have to worry about transferring the references, annotations or changes to the citation style that I have made. I can work on any PC and my citations would still be safe.

Pros
+ I don't have to download citations from webpages, it grabs it from the PDF or loads it from the web importer.
+ It manages my PDF database.

+ I can choose to export only PDFs with notations thus making writing a lot easier.
+ It allows tagging and sort by folder.
+ I don't have to manually enter citation terms. Just edit when necessary (which isn't frequent).
+ Formatting editions made in Word stays in Word. I don't have to change it from the citation manager.

Cons
+ Editing the citation style can be difficult to learn initially but once you know how, the program is perfect.
+ It is unable to recognise uncommon document types like news articles or webpages.
+ It cannot list entries with no tags automatically. I have to go through the whole list which isn't practical.