Note to be repeated ad nauseum: Do NOT use Mendeley, see my previous advice here: Mendeley Integration Prospects? - #2 by nontroppo or Citation / references - #6 by nontroppo or a bunch of other threads… It annoys me how Mendeley, given Elsevier’s dominance and marketing power sucks up naive users even though, apart from the ease of adding refs from webpages, everything about Mendeley is worst-in-class…
I will also self-quote here some general advice for students starting a Ph.D. or anyone thinking about research:
In general, the recommendation I make to my students is that building up your bibliographic references and notes on academic papers or books that will define your studies is critical to your development, and more than justifies a small financial investment. I know as a student one may feel buying a tool is hard to justify when free “good-enough” options exist, but curating knowledge is hard, and adding more bumps on the road has a price…
Word, a tool that depends on a format monopoly, does not help in any way to curate knowledge or develop long-form work, and imposes significant distractions. It was designed for “shallow” office work. Mendeley is a free corporate tool which (apart from the benefits of integration in the Elsevier walled garden) is devolving its citation system to this minimum denominator, Word. This is a fragile and impoverished environment in which to build an academic project…
Citation / references - #33 by nontroppo
If you have access to Endnote, I think the workflow is certainly easier than with Zotero, and it is not too hard to learn and there are lots of tutorials etc. I personally would still take the time to learn Zotero if I had to choose, as it affords much more future flexibility down the road.
Another potential app to try is JabRef; also free. It has I think one of the best reference database editors even beating the Gold-standard of ref managers, Bookends, in some places. It does have a LibreOffice / Word interface but I have not tried it in a full workflow so YMMV…