Searching within years

Hallo, I have a question concerning searching in Jabref. Is it possible to search for papers in several years? For example if I need to list papers published within years 2005 - 2011. Thanks, Petr

Yes, it is possible. You have to use the regular expression search (a box to check on the search tool bar).
However, the syntax is not straightforward (it is coming from java regex).
For your case, year == 200[5-9]|201[0-1] should work.
Explanation:

  • 200[5-9] specifies years 2005 to 2009.
  • | means or
  • 201[0-1] specifies years 2010 to 2011.
1 Like

This has to be added into the documentation! I was looking for ways how can I do this, and all I’ve found was how to search for a given year. Many user will think at the year field as an integer, instead of a string, and even fewer would develop the idea, which has just been presented above.

@horror-vacui Feel free to add it to the documentation: https://docs.jabref.org/finding-sorting-and-cleaning-entries/search#regular-expressions
Just click on the “Edit at github” link and you can modify the help page

year == 201[8-9] returns nothing, but year==2018 and year == 2019 do.

Was there any change in the search implementation which was not added into the help, or could it be a bug in my current version?

Does it work for you in a newer jabref version?

JabRef 5.2–2020-12-24–6a2a512
Linux 5.11.5-051105-generic amd64
Java 15.0.1

year == 200[5-9]|201[0-1] works for me.
Note that the “regular expression” button has to be activated.
Note also that there was a bug in the dark mode: activated was in fact deactivated, and vice-versa.

JabRef 5.3–2021-05-24–59fb185
Linux 4.19.0-16-amd64 amd64
Java 16.0.1
JavaFX 16+8

Thanks! The regex button was not activated. Now it works!