20 years of JabRef - JabRef as Subject of Study
In the last blog post we heard the story from a researcher, community member and French Translator. We continue our blog post series with the experiences from Igor Steinmacher who even used JabRef as Subject of Study1 in his research:
Your Journey with JabRef: When, how, and why did you join/start to use JabRef? What were your initial impressions, and what motivated you to become a part of the team?
I have been using JabRef since 2010. It has been a great journey. It supported me throughout my academic career, keeping my references up to date, tagged, organized, and ready to use. I even conducted a few systematic literature reviews relying on it, helping me organize custom fields and keep track of the progress of our work.
Memorable Moments: During your active involvement, were there any standout moments or achievements that you’re particularly proud of?
Using my contribution hat, I was a peripheral contributor for a while, working on some import/export features for some time. Later on, I have been contributing with translations in my spare time. I also worked closely with JabRef both as an instructor and as a researcher. JabRef is a great educational resource for both coding and architecture, as well as for open-source development. The community is amazing, supportive, and really welcoming to new people. My research is related to how communities receive new people and how they evolve, and JabRef maintainers are always willing to take part and collaborate.
Looking Ahead: What are your ideas for JabRef’s future? Are there any specific developments or directions you hope to see?
JabRef of the future, is a more collaborative JabRef, with people working on shared databases, synchronously :-)
Igor Steinmacher, Igor Wiese, Tayana Uchôa Conte, Marco Aurélio Gerosa: Increasing the Self-Efficacy of Newcomers to Open Source Software Projects. SBES 2015: 160-169 ↩