Release of JabRef 5.4

News
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We are proud to announce the release of the next milestone of JabRef, this time JabRef 5.4, just in time for the holidays! It’s been roughly half a year since the previous release of 5.3, and we are happy to announce that despite the still ongoing Covid-19 waves we were all fortunately able to continue working on JabRef.

Notable Changes and New Features

Thanks to this year’s Google Summer of Code, JabRef now has a PDF-fulltext search and improved metadata support. This allows you to search across libraries and linked files. Search results across several libraries can now also be shown again in a new window. It’s also possible to keep the search string when switching between libraries. Another major improvement is the metadata extraction and writing for PDFs. When generating an entry from a PDF, JabRef now checks different sources and provides an improved merge dialog to combine the extracted metadata.

Further work focused on improving the user experience in the GUI. For example, we added an icon picker to the Groups dialog to easily search for a suitable group icon. We also added the possibility to search all available citation styles together with a sample preview.

Additionaly to these, we also fixed many bugs. For a complete list of all our changes, take a look at the Changelog since our last official release!

You can get it from FOSShub.

In case you notice any bugs or problems, please check our bug tracker and consider submitting a new bug report if nobody else has been reporting the failure before.

Special Thanks

The JabRef Maintainers would like to give special thanks to all new and old contributors. We are delighted to see so many new contributors opening pull requests and making translations or simply answering questions in our support forum. The Release 5.4 now also includes Korean (한국어) as a new language. As we all work on JabRef in our free time, we feel honored that people share our enthusiasm for free software and work together to make research easier.

A big thanks also to all our donators!

We also want to thank all universities including JabRef in their academic teaching.

Finally, we want to thank all the users who are constantly testing the latest snapshots and giving feedback!

The JabRef Maintainers wish everyone Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year! :tada::champagne::fireworks: Stay safe everyone!

You like it? Foster JabRef development with Knowledge or Money.

1 Like
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Good Job everybody and thank you very much :slight_smile: :tada::sparkler::gift:

I have followed the development versions since 5.3 and this release should be a lot more stable! :slight_smile: A lot of annoying bugs were fixed and things that did not work before now do or do even better (looking at you in particular, entry preview and metadata export/import).

Jabref now allows a very easy and smooth workflow for most generic writing purposes with a very low amount of clicks by offering the new Import from ID dialogue

  1. Find bibliographic data somewhere

  2. Copy and paste the DOI, ISBN or another ID into the newly added Import from ID
    image

  3. Check for correctness and missing data and fix it, if necessary.

  4. Push entries to the external application.

Done. Easy.

To add to this minimalistic workflow, I personally have made extensive use of the linked files feature.

After having attached all my pdf-files to my entries (via regular expression search) it allowed me to not only open a pdf easily from within Jabref, but it also allowed me to use another new and very cool feature the Jabref maintainers brought to us: Fulltext search.

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Yes indeed, now whenever you are about to write a paper and you know exactly what you want to write but you can’t remember the source for the information that is in your head … and you know the source is definitely somewhere in the hundreds of pdf-documents on your computer … Jabref can do it! Enable the button, search and Jabref will show you which of the documents have your search expression within. Awesome news for anybody who is really serious about sources :slight_smile:

Finally, if you are working within a team and you have to exchange bibliographic data and you are not working with a shared database/bibfile (yet), there is another old/new way that allows you to share your data: The feature write metadata to pdf files (F6) now works again (Please do not try to write from two distinct entries to the same linked file :sweat_smile:).
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Since Jabref is now much better at importing bibliographic data, these features combined allow you to send that single pdf-file to your colleagues instead of having to send both the pdf file AND a library file (or raw bibliographic data).

Greetings to everybody and i hope i have provided a glimpse of the things that are new in Jabref 5.4 and how they could be used to help you :slight_smile: There is more!

2 Likes
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Signatures (MD5, SHA1, SHA256) on FOSSHUB do not match for the download on the GITHUB releases page.

I prefer the download of the install packages from GitHub.
To check the itegrity for my OPSI packages I check against the signatures provided on FossHub.

However, for JabRef version 5.4 the signatures do not match!

It would build trust if the signatures match.

Thank you,
Jens

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@J-U-B We first uploaded to Fosshub and then to github releases. The problem probably occurred because the build run twice (for the tag and for the main) . We used the tag builds for fosshub and probably mixed this up when uploading the files to Github

vs

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Is it possible to align this so that the signatures match again?
Or could you please provide signatures also on github?

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Yes, I am currently re-uploading the changes files to GitHub Releases.

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Thank you for the quick reponse! :+1:

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Should be the same files now.

1 Like