Hello, everyone! I am a newbie to JabRef, although I have used it before and know the most basics of how to use it. I mainly use JabRef for managing references for LaTex writing. Recently I have encountered some issues that are troubling me and I would like to ask your experience on this.
What is the best way to import bibliography entries? I currently search for the title of the paper in Google Scholar and then get its BibTex. But sometimes I don’t think this is a good idea because there are many papers in Google Scholar whose BibTex format is not standard, such as some papers whose titles have all the first letters of the words capitalized, but some only have the first letter of the first word capitalized, in addition to some errors in the author name format. How do you deal with this?
Where can I find the most authoritative BibTex format? If I add a reference entry myself by hand, should the title of the article be all in capital letters? Where can I find these standards?
I look forward to your response and would like to express my gratitude in advance!
I recommend import by ID. If your article has a DOI, then that’s best. I think Google Scholar data is not always accurate, as I suspect they employ heuristics. When in doubt, go for DOI.
Once you have the DOI, you can enter it in JabRef and download the metadata.
If you are looking for information about bibtex, I would check out CTAN: /tex-archive/info/bibtex/tamethebeast. I am not sure, if there is a standard, if a title has to be in capital letters or not, but ultimately it would depend on your citationstyle. There is the raw data (in JabRef) and once you have cited and compiled your tex document, then there is the rendered citation, which depends on the style.
Also, make sure to differentiate between bibtex (old, unmaintained) and biblatex (successor, maintained).
Oh, sorry, I didn’t express clearly. What I really meant is if there is any method to changing the default order of the reference entries. I know I can sort the references by clicking the key name of each column, but as for the default order of the references, must they be ordered by adding time?
Thanks! I see, that’s useful! But, what I actually want to ask is that can I change the default order of an entry manually and freely, for example, if I want to move the last entry to the top second position.
If you mean drag and drop the entries to manually sort and re-sort them (like you would do with cards in a Kanban board) I am not aware of this functionality in JabRef.
You can create custom fields, and you can change which fields appear in the entry table, so you might be able to create a field for manually numbering the entries and then sort the table on that field. I have not tried this specific approach, and I am not sure it would be practical, even if it works.
Something I like about JabRef is that it lets me switch between the application and a text editor, where I can do things like rearrange the entries and insert a numbering sequence automatically. Probably not what you are looking for, but it’s an idea.
But I found that even with a DOI, the downloaded metadata is not standardized - some titles have all words capitalized and others only the first word. Is it necessary to standardize the capitalization rules in JabRef entries?
You are hitting a core issue in the whole bibliography eco system. That each publisher, if not conference or journal, does it differently.
JabRef does not (yet) intend to introduce a standard here.
What JabRef offers, is save actions. Here, you can say, make everything title cased. I did not play around with abbreviations (such as SDC) and how JabRef treats them. There should also be a “Protect Terms” save actions, but I miss it in the list.
