How to use Jabref for maintaining references and citations

Jabref is a free open source bibliography and reference management soware. You can download

Jabref for free from their main website and you can use the soware for maintaining citations and

references. Several reasons to use Jabref:

1. it has an intuitive interface

2. it can import references from anywhere on the web

3. you can autolink pdf ﬁles

4. it can read ﬁle annotations

e last two points are particularly useful if you work on large projects where you need to read lots

of pdfs and need to ﬁnd information from them that you will need to later assimilate. For this

purpose, take the following steps:

• Open Jabref

• You can either search independently on the web or you can search from Jabref

• Let’s say you search independently from the web

• Identify if the source has a PDF

• If it has a pdf then download and save it to a local folder

• In the same local folder, keep a copy of a bibtex that you will use with Jabref

• As Jabref is a bibtex parser and bibtex based reference management soware, you will need to use

bibtex to make use of Jabref

• Create a new entry in Jabref (there are other ways of using it, but for now, for the sake of

simplicity, let’s say we choose to do this)

• In the general tab, you will see next to the entry a link to the local ﬁle. Click on it. Jabref will link

this ﬁle locally

• Read the pdf and annotate it as you like. If you are on Mac, use the built in Preview PDF ﬁle

viewer and annotate the ﬁle. You can highlight and mark up and write notes.

• Aer a while you will see Jabref will populate the ﬁle annotation tab on the entry. If you check the

ﬁle annotation tab, you will see the annotations