JabRef 5.7 Release

We are proud to announce the release of version 5.7 of our favorite citation manager JabRef. Several bugs have been fixed, and some improvements were made to the UI:

Notable Changes and New Features

Citations can now also be looked up in the Biodiversity Heritage Library and we also added support to import Citavi backup files. A new filter for the Unlinked Files Search has been introduced to respect file ignore patterns defined in a .gitignore file in the search directory. We also improved the automatic detection of the library’s charset and fixed a couple of issues regarding the writing of XMP Metadata to linked files.

Notable UI improvements include the feature to drag and drop entries across libraries, by dropping them on the library tab. The “Automatic Field Editor” dialog was redesigned and polished by our GSoC mentee @HoussemNasri. There may be some issues left, feel free to report them in our issue tracker.

As we updated the full-text search engine to Lucene 9.3, JabRef will recreate the search index in the background on start. Be aware that switching back and forth between the current version and any older version will make JabRef repeat this process every time, and this will take a long time for huge databases with many linked files.

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

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.

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 leisure 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! Especially we would like to thank our GSoC mentee @HoussemNasri for his extensive work on JabRef and Google for providing the scholarship for his project in GSoC. We expect to include the result of his efforts to improve the three-way-merge dialog in the next release.

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

Finally, we would like 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!