Please remember that feature parity does not imply similar quality: the technical implementation, performance, look and feel may vary strongly, resulting in different user experiences.

N.B. For some tools there are pro, group or site wide institutional licenses that expand your web space, group size&space and more. This applies to Mendeley, Flow, Zotero and PapersApp.

This table is not exhaustive. Only criteria often used to determine the tool of your choice are listed. More extensive comparisons are available in the Wikipedia article comparing reference management tools. Also see the in-depth comparison of Zotero, Mendeley and Docear (by the latter) or the comparison by the Technical University of Munich (in German).

There is so much to cover that we chose to do develop this table further step by step, on request....  Annotate PDFs? Google Docs support? Automatic file renaming? Dropbox integration? Institutional editions? Number of available styles? Style editing option? Webpage snapshots? Tagging? Advanced search? (Public) author profiles? Possibilities of add-ons for Zotero such as Zotfile? Find full text from bibliographic reference? Page numbers in in-text citations (Mendeley does not support that)? Library link resolver support? Support for citing with LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice? Available document types? (Global) search and replace? Share annotations?

N.B. The indication of the "easiest/best" import methods in the table above does not take into account the possibility to search databases from within the tool (because most people prefer the native interface). It also does not take into account the possibility to download a PDF and have the tool build up the bibliographic metadata from that. Please consider these two options in the light of your personal workflow when comparing tools on their importing abilities.

N.B. Endnote, Reference Manager, RefWorks, Papers and EndnoteWeb also have the option to search literature databases from within the tool itself. This offers limited search functionality but makes for easy importing of references. There is much variation in which databases are supported.

N.B. Mendeley has the additional optiopn to save references by searching the combined library of Mendeley users' references

N.B. Zotero has the additional option to add items by identifier (DOI, PMID, ISBN). Zotero does a lookup in Crossref, PubMed or Worldcat to get the bibliographical data.

N.B. RefWorks (and expected also at Zotero) has the additional option to add items through RSS-feeds (e.g. of a search in Scopus).

Explanation of the terms:

• Direct: the search engine has a menu option to export directly to the reference management tool: this is fast, reliable and allows for exporting of not just the bibliographical data, but also abstracts and references lists.
• Man(ually): type in or copy/past all the bibliographical data by hand: slow and prone to errors.
• Save&import: save the bibliographical data in a standard format (RIS, BibTex, Endnote etc.) and then import that file into the reference management system: relatively slow, but reliable.
• Scrape (aka web importer method): the reference management tool offers installation of a browser bookmarklet that can recognize and capture bibliographical information on any web page. This is easy initially, but does require that you check on the completeness and correctness of the data capture. It may be 100% correct or very incomplete and useless. When it is useless the option is placed between brackets in the table above.
• Get-it link: download is through an option in the University of Groningen library link resolver that shows up in search results. This uses OpenURL technology. It is relatively fast, but does not support batch import and extracts only the most basic data, that is also sometimes incomplete (e.g. only first authors or no author initials or missing titles - the Get-it link relies on how search engines construct their OpenURL). Search engines for which Get-it link import may be incomplete are indicated with an asterisk.

Wish to see import options from another search engine covered in this table? Just let us know, using the comments option below.