JabRef 5.10 Release

Posted Sep 2, 2023

By JabRef e.V. 3 min read

We are thrilled to announce the release of JabRef version 5.10, a significant update to our beloved reference management software. This release comes with a plethora of new features, improvements, and fixes that make managing your bibliographic data smoother than ever. Have a look at the changelog for a full list of all changes.

Highlighted Features

Enhanced External Changes Resolver Dialog

Say goodbye to confusion when resolving external changes! We’ve added a field that shows the BibTeX/biblatex source for added and deleted entries, giving you more context to make informed decisions (#9509).

Optimized Backup Management

Smarter Backups: JabRef now writes a new backup file only if there is a change, reducing unnecessary backups (#9679).
Streamlined Backup Paths: Backups of libraries are now collected together in a more organized manner. The backup path can be configured in the preferences as well.

User-Specific Comment Field

Collaboration just got easier with our new user-specific comment field. Multiple users can now make separate comments on the same entry (#543).

We’ve reorganized and streamlined menus, making them more intuitive. In particular, we moved the preferences menu command from the options menu to the file menu. (#9768).

Integration with External Tools

E-mail and Kindle: We integrated two mail actions (“As Email” and “To Kindle”) under a new “Send” option in the right-click & Tools menus. The Kindle option creates an email targeted to the user’s Kindle email, which can be set in preferences under “External programs” (#6186)
Sublime Text: We added support for pushing citations to Sublime Text 3 (#10098).

Improved Fetchers

GVK fetcher: You can now use the GVK fetcher to search inside the new K10plus catalog (#10189).
ICAR eprints Automatically fetch full texts from IACR eprints with our new fetcher (#9651).
BVB fetcher: The german Bibliotheksverbund Bayern can now be searched in with our new experimental fetcher and parser for the MarcXML format (#9461).

Secure Credential Storage

We now encrypt and store your proxy password and custom API keys in the OS’s native credential store, enhancing security (#10044).

Fulltext Search Upgraded

We’ve upgraded to Lucene 9.7 for full-text search, and as a result, the search index will be rebuilt for better performance (#9584).

New Themes Contributed by Users

You are looking for more color in your life? Our new theme collection has you covered! We have collected a couple of user contributed Dark Themes and Light Themes at our new theme website themes.jabref.org. A huge thanks to all theme creators!

We have paid special attention to the GDPR compliance. We have implemented a detailed Privacy Policy and options to disable all online connections (#10064).

… and more

This barely scratches the surface. With improved support for parsing file paths, MathML, custom entry types, and a host of other enhancements, this is the update you don’t want to miss.

You can get JabRef as free software from FOSShub.

In case you notice any bugs or problems, please browse through our bug tracker and consider submitting a new bug report if nobody else has been reporting the failure before.

Known Issues

Some of our fetchers currently show connection problems. We are investigating these issues and try to find a solution for this. In the meantine you can use the JabRef Browser Extension

IMPORTANT: Build Instructions from Source for Linux Users

This release requires JabRefs custom jdk for building. Download custom jdk21

  
          mkdir /tmp/jdk
          wget -qO- https://files.jabref.org/jdks/jdk-linux-x64.tar.gz | tar xz -C tmp/jdk
          echo "JDK21=tmp/jdk/jdk-21" >> "$GITHUB_ENV"
          ls tmp/jdk

          echo "org.gradle.java.installations.paths=tmp/jdk/jdk-21" >> gradle.properties
          echo "org.gradle.java.installations.auto-detect=false" >> gradle.properties
          cat gradle.properties

          sed -i "s/JavaLanguageVersion.of(20)/JavaLanguageVersion.of(21)/" build.gradle