What I was looking for had to work at least in Linux, Mac and Windows, and preferably have some sort of social feature that would enable students to share papers with each other students and/or with their supervisors. Ideally it should be free for academic use, or have a very reasonable price.

I found two applications that satisfy those requirements and add a lot more: Mendeley and Zotero. There are two versions of Zotero available; version 2 is still in Beta (but is a stable one) and includes public and private groups along with other features. I will consider version 2 of Zotero here.

Both of them:

• Have automatic capture of citations
• Manage the PDFs library and allow the use of tags and collections to organize the library
• Allow over the cloud backup and sync of the library
• Create private and public groups to share references
• Include ways of adding notes
• Have a search tool for PDF’s and notes
• Are able to cite from within Word and OpenOffice and create an automatic list of references using a wide variety of styles
• Export and import references is various formats (including BiBTeX)
• Enable access to the library from anywhere through a web interface (if you choose to register and synchronize to the cloud).

Zotero is a Firefox plugin (minimum requirement is Firefox 3.0) and works with Mac, Linux and Windows. It has a very good selection of screencasts were you can easily learn more about its many basic functions. There is also a good resource of documents about the use and configuration of Zotero.

Mendeley is a stand alone program that works in different platforms: Linux, Mac and Windows. The getting started document is a good place to learn Mendeley basic features.

Now the differences: Zotero is opensource; Mendeley is not, but all the features that you get when you subscribe the service are, and will remain, free (in the future they will add features that will only be available to premium users for a fee).

If you start using one of these systems and then want to transfer your library to another program you can export your library to a standard format. Mendeley is even able to import a Zotero Library directly.

If you choose to sync to the cloud Mendeley web accounts are currently limited to 500MB and Zotero is limited to 100MB, both of them free. Zotero allows you to buy more space. Mendeley encourages users to ask for more space if they need it.

I started looking for one and found two very suitable bibliography managers: Mendeley and Zotero.