I’m new to jabref and really struggling to figure out how this thing works. I’d love some recommendations for resources that can help me in building out a library that I can grow over time and use for a variety of writing and research projects. I’ve tried to describe in detail what I’m looking for below, and I’d love help on any of these items you can provide. I’d also like to know if anything I’ve described is not possible at all, because I may need to reconsider whether jabref is the right solution for me.
Here’s what i’m trying to do -
1 - Create a library to serve my immediate needs for managing a segment of my library.
- I’m writing a series of papers in apa style - 6th or 7th ed is fine. I have references for 5 different papers, each with their own group. Some references are aligned to multiple papers/groups.
- References include several non-research journal reference types, which has become a big source of errors.
- listings from online databases/reference sites (using that term loosely) like wikipedia, metacritic, demand sage, etc.
- online forums like reddit and steam community discussions
- web news articles from tech magazines
- articles from websites of newspapers like NYTimes
- legal briefs (e.g. amicus briefs to us supreme ct)
- press releases and patch notes from game companies on their company websites
- tech reports from consulting and academic research firms
2 - Get all metadata needed for APA style references, and create reference formats for bibliographies and in-text citations.
- APA style has specific requirements for the above citation types, but they don’t appear to be part of the default entry types. Selecting apa style in the entry preview menu (the only place I’ve seen the option for anything related to apa style), did nothing to change entry types available either. Searching for a data dictionary on the forums and the support pages yielded nothing. I created my own entry types with the fields i needed, and mapped that to a jstyles file that I created using the export filter tool thing.
3 - Create a library with preferences and formats that I can add my old mendeley references to and get cleaned up.
- I have a large reference library i’ve tried importing from mendeley, and between my imported and new refs i’m trying to add using the firefox plugin, articles are not getting saved, or are getting deleted when i dont want them too (see errors above).
- Also, with the different reference types i’m using, i have 3 different source types - journal, website, and source (which i use for newspaper, database, research firm, or similar) those all display in different columns despite serving the same purpose in the reference (apa style is based on 4 components - author, date, title, source, which can come from different fields based on the specific reference class, but serve one of these four basic functions).
4- Set up a tabular display format in the gui aligned to my workflow that will help with search, additional cleaning, and adding reference files as I grow my library.
- Specifically, I would like to be able to move content from one field to another based on what is appropriate for the reference type (e.g. news articles shouldn’t have anything in the journal field, but it should have something in the website field, and databases should have the name of the platform in the source field).
- Both mendeley and jabref read in most of my items as ‘misc’ types and don’t pull in or display the fields I need to generate references. The default has been to throw everything into the journal field, which will break when applying the styles created in my jstyles file for my custom apa style references.
- Ideally I would like to keep the fields separate, since they are considered different in APA style, and probably would be differentiated in bibtext, however I would like to have one column for the combined journal/source/website field so that I can easily see where information is missing. Same with Author/Editor
5 - Connect my library to libreoffice to import references for in-text citation and a reference list. At this point the data is far too messy for that to be viable.
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In case it’s somehow useful, in trying to solve for this myself I’ve gotten multiple errors that I can’t figure out. I’ve already posted about those here Export list of import errors - #10 by 10000, and here "The library has been modified by another program" - #27 by 10000
Here’s a copy of part of my library. These 326 articles are for my current work, but I have about 3000-3500 more that are mostly academic research articles that I’ll need to deal with eventually–But I want to get the library stable and working before adding more.
CaseStudyLibrary_test.bib (242.7 KB)
my version info
JabRef 5.15–2024-07-10–1eb3493
Windows 11 10.0 amd64
Java 21.0.2
JavaFX 22.0.1+7