JabRef – Literature Management | Hacker News Reader

JabRef – Literature Management

jabref.org

57 pointssmartmic26 comments

I've tried JabRef, Zotero, and Mendeley. The latter two seem more modern and friendly in some ways but I prefer JabRef. Works well with LaTeX/BiBTeX and it looks more old-school, which I like. Mendeley's advantage is that it has free online storage.

Have you tried zotero 7?

It is currently in beta but they polished the UI and the UX is now much better than before. If not, I would recommend that you give it a try.

Zotero 7 is excellent. I also like the official Zotero iPad app, which is quite decent to read and annotate papers in your Zotero library on the go.

The new iPad app for Zotero 7 is great. Editing just seems to work. I use my WebDAV server for storage and my changes just show up across devices without worrying. Really great way to manage papers.

Now if only there were an iPad with a screen like the Remarkable (or a Zotero app for the Remarkable).

Zotero 7 is the first usable version in 15 years for me. And it's great.

I use zotero with the better bibtex extension. But when I finalize a document, I use jabref and its 'make a new library from .aux file' tool which can then create a .bib file with only the references used in the document. Much easier to archive than my full zotero library with thousands of entries. Also makes it easier to fine tune any edits to the .bib references for that specific document and template.

Same here, except that I gather all the bibliography entries into a Zotero collection organized by paper and only export that to the latex workspace rather than using JabRef. Works a treat and keeps the size of the .bib file small.

How do you do the collection per paper? Is that manual or automatable?

For me, that's manual—I make sure everything I've cited is in the .bib file, and move papers into another collection if they end up not being relevant for a particular paper.

This is probably an automatable task, but it's generally not too much of a burden to do manually. I add a 'needs-review' tag to papers I've identified in a literature review, and categorize it when I get around to reading it.

If Zotero, or more appropriately better-bibtex, had a 'make collection from .aux file' option, than that would be fantastic. For some documents there can be such a number of references that doing this manually would be a chore. But having that collection in zotero would be useful by itself as a resource. Maybe I'll head over and make that suggestion...

I just use Zotero to copy-paste bibtex references into a .bib file as I go along. You can do this using the "bibtex generic" citation style.

At Github, https://github.com/JabRef/jabref

The main reason I haven't adopted Zotero is their lack of a Android app. Something like that on the road map for JabRef?

I'm working on a Zotero Android app to assist with my own research. I hope to have something releasable next year.

Jabref uses bibtex as internal format, which is fairly standard. There are some apps on the play store if you search for "bibtex", though i personally haven't tried them.

I guess the main difficulty might be in regards to how you store the file links and associated files.

Zotero can output bib file. I use those files in production seamlessly

It can and I've used this as well to export from zotero, but there's a subtle difference in workflow between having to "export" your db in order to use it on another device (not to mention being bound to a browser extension) and having your db in a text based format that a multitude of software can directly work with.

Zotero has a beta Android app [1][2]. I haven't used it, so I don't know if any functionality is missing.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.zotero.and... [2] https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/110371/available-for-be...

Zoo for zotero is pretty good ;)

I think the dev do not work on it anymore, but it's in a very usable state and open source.

Their site only lists Desktop (Mac, Windows, and Linux) and web browser extensions, so I'm guessing no. I'd like be to be wrong. Are there other Android apps that aren't necessarily provided by Zotero? They seem to have a pretty open API for access to your online library. For example, I used to use a completely different iOS app than the Zotero proper app for annotating PDFs.

I like Zoo for Zotero on Android. With a bit of customization it gets the job done. https://github.com/mickstar/Zoo-For-Zotero

I’ve recently become a Zotero user. I’m liking the mobile support in the iOS ecosystem. Jabref highlights search and discovery in the docs. Does anyone have opinions on how that compares to the other apps?

how does this compare to zotero?

Doesn't. I used jabref for a long time, zotero is better. Zotero has integration with browsers and sync which is its biggest advantage

I love that Jabref supports working with multiple libraries (having multiple open the same time, moving entries between). Best Zotero could do was restart with difference preference files (has that changed? haven't used it in some time).

And really like that Jabref syncing requires just syncing the library folder. Zotero syncing really nudges you to the paid plan. setting up webdav just isn't as simple and the list of supported providers isn't that long.

It really helped me that the backend is a plain bibtex file. I could resolve issues with it myself. I can also version libraries with git.

It's confusing that the name of the app and the domain name are spelled differently.

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