- Displays and sort references neatly and tidily
- Organising references is intuitive and aligns with what I want to do with them – search, group, subgroup, share, export in a range of formats. Tags are automatically assigned to references in groups.
- Journal article import is seamless and accurate – this has improved vastly in the last 5 years, with RIS now in common use and ‘send to citation manager’ buttons
- Reports and webpages also come in with accurate details (depends on good metadata!)
- It’s easy to format perfect bibliographies without manual ‘fixing’ – e.g. bulk conversion to sentence style titles
- Online and desktop versions have clear integration – no more confusingly similar appearances and lack of clarity as to which you are dealing with.
- Large libraries are stable (no more crashes)
- Rights management is incorporated, making it legal and transparent to share reference full texts
- Reference mapping and data visualisation are common place
- Text mining and AI help automate summaries of literature
Note that I haven’t included ‘must be free’ as developing these features will need funding. A freemium model would be good…