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JabRef: Nice Open Source Bibliography Tool (like EndNote)

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mouser:
I have a fair amount of antipathy and distrust for Thomson ISI, the makers of EndNote, the dominant bibliography management tool on the marketplace.  They basically bought out every competitor product to endnote and then let them all whither and die, including the superior ones (Procite).

I've been very tempted over the years to embark on writing a free alternative to EndNote -- I think it's a crime (and ridiculous) that academic institutions haven't funded an alternative program that would be free for researchers.

So anyway it gives me a lot of pleasure to see a project like JabRef, which by all appearances looks quite substantial and promising:

JabRef is an open source bibliography reference manager. The native file format used by JabRef is BibTeX, the standard LaTeX bibliography format. JabRef runs on the Java VM (version 1.5 or newer), and should work equally well on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

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http://jabref.sourceforge.net/




from http://www.betanews.com/

Nod5:
The latest JabRef is looking good! I will install and try it out a bit.

Yeah, the aggregated cost of EndNote licenses for academic institutions all around the world must be staggering by now! :o Imagine what a great FOSS program those resources could have fueled instead.

Another project of interest is OpenOffice Bibliographic (OOoBib), http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/ . They request programmers:
When will this wonderful facility be available ?  Development work for Bibliographic enhancements to OpenOffice is expected to commence from late 2007, and probably available for users in OpenOffice version 2.x/3.x (mid-late 2008 ???) see feature timeline. Also see a blog on plans for Writer.

See our development plans on the Developers' Wiki and the list of project tasks below.

The project urgently needs some experienced C++ developers to get this important work to the programing stage.
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nontroppo:
mouser: sentiments shared perfectly!  :up: Luckily on the Mac, the Thomson stranglehold is less comprehensive. There are two excellent modern apps, Sente and Bookends, that survive outside of the Endnote kingdom. They are close to dream reference manager apps overall, from small responsive indie developers.

I've used Jabref in the past in my long-lasting exploration to escape from Reference manager/endnote. But being pretty addicted to cite-while-you-write, I didn't like the workflow it offered. I also couldn't get it to handle the RIS MIME-types for quick reference downloads into the app. Has that changed?

I've been dreaming about OOoBib since it first formulated itself a few years ago, but one cannot live on dreams alone (and certainly can't cite with them!)

luc:
Thomson/Endnote is the most inept monopoly project that I know of   - no, I never wanted to organize images with Endnote, just easy ways to get the references into it and a big library of reference styles easily applied. New versions of Endnote could be doing more than merely introducing new database formats.
All the best to JabRef !

zridling:
Yet another type of software (like math calculation software) that should be open source, no matter what. Students and researchers could start using JabRef at the beginning of their academic career and retain their references across years of papers, studies, and monos.

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