I love JabRef for collecting and organizing my bibliography. I have been using it every day for many years. However, I’m always tempted to shift toward other bibliographic managers when I need to write a scientific paper and use my entries as citations in MS Word. All the available solutions (BibTex4Word, Docear4Word, and exporting the bib file as .xml and use the Word’s internal citation manager) are critically suboptimal (Docear4Word, maybe the closest to the optimal solution, actually does not work anymore and its development has been interrupted). Since MS Word is the most widely used word processor this is a truly relevant limitation of JabRef (note that Zotero and Mendeley are completely integrated with MS Word). For this reason, in my opinion, JabRef developers should seriously consider creating an add-in for MS Word that can read directly the JabRef .bib file, can insert hypertextual citations, allows cross-referencing and formats references and citation markers using CLS-defined citation styles. After this improvement, I’m strong textsure that JabRef will become the most complete bibliographic manager available.
2 Likes
Actually, Docear4word still works (at least) with MS Word 2016, but it is truly suboptimal, lacking features. The real problem however is that development has stopped in 2016 both on Docear4Word and Bibtex4Word. A domestic solution is highly anticipated from JabRef.
1 Like
FYI, I have transformed this into an issue. As this a major new feature that will probably require some word addon, we labeled this as a “good candidate for a university project”. Of course anyone else is free to tackle this issue. We core developers probably won’t work on this due to beeing busy with maintaining JabRef already in our free time.
1 Like
Thank you so much, Christoph!
I will be an enthusiastic beta-tester as soon as a beta-version will be available!
Pier Sergio