General feedback

Help
1

Dear Jabref Developers,

This is 1st time that I use this software and I found it way different than what I expected.

  1. It seems this gives an impression not for reference job but for a personal library job; if this is the intention JabLib would be a better name.
  2. The panel design is clean but not using space efficient enough: left panel is rather fixated at group I suppose and if only web search is needed the left panel can be sufficient for search results as well rather bringing a new window! Maybe in future we can have tags of what left panel is functioning.
  3. bib library table is rather squeezed with more features than it intended: rather than tags, file, weblinks, the fields like author, title, proceedings are way more important but have been queued after columns of file attachment and weblinks; it seems a compact view mode would be important for Jabref to function so that it can focus on just referencing jobs.
  4. there is a bug at library table column width settings: when you drag between columns, it does not dynamically show the change of width of columns and sometimes it directly freeze at a certain width and cannot respond to further adjustments until some delay.
  5. Regarding the data structure, Jabref directly uses bib file as libraries, and you can have multiple libraries, which unfortunately does not makes sense: you can have multiple bib files perhaps for different paper uses and each of them includes an entry of a same paper, which then should be considered as duplicates in your big and whole library. As working with hundreds of papers and books, it seems a general library setting would make more sense and you can generate as many as you want reference/bibliography lists from your library as bib files.

Please forgive my language and almost nonsense comments.

Regards

2

Hi,

thanks for your feedback. JabRef is used by many users with each of them having different needs and workflows like you.

  1. Well, it depends on your workflow again. I personally use one bib file per thesis/paper/project/whatever as they might have different topics.

  2. You can always adjust the size or simply hide/show the search when need, but agree that this can be waste of space if you have no groups.

  3. In the preferences you can customize the columns of the main table and select only those which you need.

  4. Please report that bug to our issue tracker at https://github.com/jabref

  5. This is actually intended and the core feature of JabRef. The file can always be edited also with a simple text editor.That’s the strength of JabRef. And as noted in 1), it all depends on your workflow.

Regards