🎄 JabRef 5.8 Release 🎄

We are proud to announce the release of version 5.8 of our favorite citation manager JabRef, just in time for the holidays! And a huge welcome to @ThiloTe in our team of maintainers and as the new community manager!

Notable Changes and New Features

The most considerable change is the new 3-Way-Merge feature that was created by our GSoC mentee @HoussemNasri. This now allows you to easily review and edit changes when merging entries and cleaning up your database. Another huge advantage of this feature is the ability to merge groups, keywords, comments and files when merging entries. It will also display a warning if the authors are the same but just formatted differently. The External changes resolver dialog now also shows the preview of the entry and the option to merge entries using the new 3-Way-Merge feature.

Another massive improvement under the hood is the reworked backup and saving feature of JabRef. JabRef will now regularly create automatic backups (up to 10) in the user’s app dir. In case an existing newer backup was found at startup, JabRef now provides a direct link to the backup folder to review the backup files. Additionally, the rework fixed many bugs related to saving and detecting changes in the library.

We have improved the loading performance of large libraries. Especially Mac users with an Arm64 CPU (Apple M1) will now profit from a massive performance increase, as we now provide native builds for macOS on Arm64. Besides that, this release also contains several UI improvements (e.g wording, titles, styling) of dialogs, improved the contrast of the color scheme for highlighting search results and fixed a bug where JabRef would display the wrong group tree after opening more than one library.

Another notable bug fix is the correct rendering of the fields, issue, number, eid and pages fields in the entry preview. A big thanks to @ThiloTe for analyzing this complex issue, showing that the word “issue” can have multiple meanings, and providing a solution rationale!

Be aware that if you have not yet configured a file directory, the global default directory for storing PDFs is now the documents folder in the user’s home. The fallback directory of the file folder is the general file directory.

As we updated the full-text search engine to Lucene 9.4, JabRef will recreate the search index in the background on start. Switching back and forth between the current version and any older version will make JabRef repeat this process every time. As this will take some time for a huge databases with many linked files you can always choose to disable full text indexing.

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.

Following external contributors contributed to this JabRef release:

(Created by github-contributors-list))

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 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 explore the wide world of possibilities that literature management provides during the upcoming holidays with inner peace and joy!