Is there any way to turn off automatic check for presence of Comment/Review fields in latest versions of Jabref?

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#1

We mostly use Jabref to search through several DBs of papers in our work group. We put two different kinds of data into the «Comment» and «Review» fields. Mixing these data up is undesirable in our case. In spite of the fact the «Review» field was deprecated some time ago, Jabref still shows data stored in this field on the «Other fields» panel.

Is there any way to disable the check for presence of the retired «Review» field when opening BibTeX files? Every time my colleagues and myself open one of our DBs, we should cancel this dialogue and this is kind of tedious. I’ll be grateful for any suggestions (using version lower than 4.2 is an obvious solution, but it would be nice to be able to use 5.x in stead).

Implementing switch to disable checking for presence of the Comment/Review fields in the BibTeX files being opened
#2

Hi

this is part of the migration which is run on startup. Simple workaround would be just to rename that fieldr review maybe to Reviewa. You can use JabRef’s feature under Edit → Manage field names and content to do this for the whole library.

#3

@Siedlerchr Hello! The trick has worked, thank you very much.

Just one small question. Do you think it would make any sense to request implementing a switch (check-box somewhere in preferences, I suppose) to make it possible to turn off this check, if necessary, in future versions. Or was the final decision made to exorcise the «Review» field for good (I expect you to be one of the developers, please correct me, if I am wrong)?

#4

Hi,

yes, I’m one of the JabRef dev, but I don’t know exactly why this review/comment field thing was changed. I only know that it probably was around version 4.2 when we did this, but unfortunately I don’t remember why we changed this. Maybe for clarity. Maybe @koppor remembers

#5

The discussion on the field started at https://github.com/JabRef/jabref/pull/3658.

After a discussion with colleagues, it became apparent, that the Review Tab is maybe named a bit misleadingly. After all I know it is meant for comments about this paper, and I guess few really use it for actual peer-reviews.

In the case of file links, we have following dialog (in 4.3.1)

grafik

JabRef 5.3 does not present the dialog to me. It was removed at remove unused swing stuff · JabRef/jabref@b231bb0 · GitHub in 2019 by @Siedlerchr.

I was expecting the button “Do not show these options in the future”. Seems, we lost that functionality completely at that commit (that localization was removed 2 hours later at remove obsolete localization strings · JabRef/jabref@731b9d2 · GitHub).

(Side note: I used gitk to find that commit - see How to grep (search) committed code in the Git history - Stack Overflow for details).

#6

I opened the issue Enable turning off automatic check for presence of review field · Issue #512 · koppor/jabref · GitHub

#7

Thank you for this initiative, Oliver. It is a delight to know that your voice is heard…