JabRef

JabRef is an open-source, cross-platform citation and reference management software.^[3][4] It is used to collect, organize and search bibliographic information.

JabRef

JabRef 5.9 under Linux
Original author(s)	Morten O. Alver, Nizar N. Batada, et al.
Developer(s)	The JabRef team[1]
Initial release	29 November 2003 (21 years ago) (2003-11-29)
Stable release	5.15[2]  / 10 July 2024; 9 months ago (10 July 2024)
Repository	github.com/JabRef/jabref
Written in	Java
Operating system	Windows, macOS, Linux
Size	180 MB
Available in	23 languages
List of languages Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (classical), Danish, Dutch, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Vietnamese
Type	Reference management
License	MIT License
Website	www.jabref.org

JabRef has a target audience of academics and many university libraries have written guides on its usage.^[5][6][7] It uses BibTeX and BibLaTeX as its native formats and is therefore typically used for LaTeX.^[8] The name JabRef stands for Java, Alver, Batada, Reference. The original version was released on November 29, 2003.^[9]

Features

JabRef supports Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, it is available free of charge and is actively developed.

Collection

• Import options for over 15 reference formats.
• Extraction of metadata from PDFs.
• Retrieval of articles and bibliographic information based on identifiers (arXiv, Biodiversity Heritage Library, CrossRef, DiVA, DOI, IACR eprints, ISBN, Library of Congress, MathSciNet, mEDRA, PubMed, RFC, SAO/NASA ADS, and zbMATH).
• Support for the online scientific catalogues of ACM Portal, arXiv, CiteSeer, Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies, CrossRef, DBLP, DOAJ, GVK, IEEEXplore, INSPIRE-HEP, MathSciNet, Medline, SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System, Springer, and zbMATH.
• Browser based reference importing with the JabFox add-on for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Vivaldi.

Organization

• Supports hierarchical groupings based on keywords, tags, search terms etc.
• Includes features for searching, filtering and detecting duplicates.
• Attempts to complete partial bibliographic data by comparing with curated online catalogues such as Google Scholar, Springer or MathSciNet.
• Citation keys, metadata fields and file renaming rules are customizable.

Interoperability

• Thousands of citation styles are built-in.
• Cite-as-you-write functionality for external applications such as Emacs, Kile, LyX, Texmaker, TeXstudio, Vim and WinEdt.
• Support for Word and LibreOffice/OpenOffice for inserting and formatting citations.
• Library is saved as a human readable text file.
• When editing in a group, the library can be synchronized with a SQL database.

See also

• Comparison of reference management software