>Zotero can do anything EndNote can do, is Open Source, and with that won't drive your PI up the wall with yet another expense.
My university offers EndNote (plus Web of Science and the Clarivate stack) for free for students and many of them don't use it - they'd rather manually manage the bibliography in their Word documents. The university even ran tutorials to show them how to set it up, add citations, and export the references, thinking maybe the students didn't understand the value of bibliography management software. Nope, even with the tutorials there was almost no uptake.
It turns out the problem was EndNote all along. I tried it myself - one of the worst user experiences imaginable, and I could totally understand why even doing references by hand is preferable. Eventually I told some of my own students that I use Zotero and to give it a go even though we're not supposed to endorse other software. Two weeks later most of them were using it.
So I'm actually quite confused at the fact that Zotero is offered as a free alternative to EndNote, unless the EndNote that I've used is some weird dated inferior version...
The university just needs to set an assignment which needs to be submitted twice: once with citation style A, and again with citation style B. Anyone not using citation management software will quickly start.
The point about academic research is freedom, in every possible meaning. Including not using the right tools for the job. This ensures "natural selection" of the ideas, processes and workflows that actually work.
Having used Zotero, Mendeley and Endnote I ended up on Endnote. I like their metadata scraping, their Word plugin and that many journals offer a pre-configured reference template. But yes as a DBMS it lacks alot in the filter/grouping features and date fields don't convert format intelligently.
First manuscript in my PhD I just hand-typed the bibliography. But when you get to a few hundred in a document and over 1000 relevant to your work that you want to keep track of, ah and when you need to resubmit manuscripts with a different reference format, and once I made the jump to actually using it and figuring out a few of the quirks, I now quite like Endnote since my institution has a site licence.
Yes. Professionals don't hand-edit references in the writing document. Update the template and click refresh. That said, I also use Endnote because it's free for me.
Exactly my experience as a student. Picked up EndNote, hated the interface and dropped it hard. I did need something to manage my references so I ended up on Zotero which is incredibly easy to use and just works. I use it to manage personal-interest files too.
My university offers EndNote (plus Web of Science and the Clarivate stack) for free for students and many of them don't use it - they'd rather manually manage the bibliography in their Word documents. The university even ran tutorials to show them how to set it up, add citations, and export the references, thinking maybe the students didn't understand the value of bibliography management software. Nope, even with the tutorials there was almost no uptake.
It turns out the problem was EndNote all along. I tried it myself - one of the worst user experiences imaginable, and I could totally understand why even doing references by hand is preferable. Eventually I told some of my own students that I use Zotero and to give it a go even though we're not supposed to endorse other software. Two weeks later most of them were using it.
So I'm actually quite confused at the fact that Zotero is offered as a free alternative to EndNote, unless the EndNote that I've used is some weird dated inferior version...