JabRef 5.6 Release

We are proud to announce the release of the next milestone of JabRef, this time JabRef 5.6. As always, this release comes with several bug fixes and also some new features.

Notable Changes and New Features

This release comes with several new fetchers for the websearch (ResearchGate, SemanticScholar and Directory of Open Access Books). Since OttoBib ceased service, we also switched to OpenLibrary to fetch citations by ISBN. We also enabled the user to customize their access key for some fetchers if they have privileged access to certain web-portals/databases.

Since our last publicly announced release we have made a lot of changes behind the scene. We have, for instance, completely switched text encoding to Unicode, more and more preferences have effect without the need to restart JabRef and we completely revised the Open-/LibreOffice connection. Feedback on this is very welcome. Of course, we also fixed many other bugs and updated some external dependencies. As a result JabRef should feel a bit faster and consume less system memory for most tasks as compared to version 5.5. We are very happy about that!

A notable change for users (with large databases) is the need to recreate the search index. Switching back and forth JabRef versions and meanwhile adding PDFs also requires rebuilding the index now and then. Having realized indexing can take a long time for huge libraries, a preference option was added to disable it entirely.

For a complete list of all our changes, take a look at the Changelog.

You can get JabRef for free from FOSShub.

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

Special Thanks

The JabRef Maintainers would like to give special thanks to all new and old contributors. We are delighted to see contributors opening pull requests and making translations or simply answering questions in our support forum. As we all work on JabRef in our free time, we feel honored that people share our enthusiasm for free software and work together to make research easier.

A big thanks also to all our donators!

We also want to thank all universities including JabRef in their academic teaching.

Finally, we want to thank all the users who are constantly testing the latest snapshots and giving feedback!

The JabRef Maintainers wish everyone to find themselves filled with inner peace and joy exploring the vast world of possibilities that literature management brings to you!