JabRef — The Complete Guide: Free BibTeX Reference Management for Theses, Papers and Standards
JabRef is an open-source reference manager that works directly on BibTeX and BibLaTeX files — plain-text files, with no lock-in to a closed format. It especially suits graduate students and engineers who write theses, papers and reports in LaTeX and keep a long list of papers, books and standards.
JabRef
JabRef community
BibTeX and BibLaTeX reference manager — papers, standards and theses, working with LaTeX and LyX.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Catalogue search — CrossRef, IEEE Xplore and more, from inside the program.
- Lookup by identifier — a DOI, ISBN or arXiv ID fills in all the details.
- PDF extraction — reference details pulled from the paper file.
- Housekeeping — duplicate detection and organising references into groups.
- Editor integration — LyX and TeXstudio, plus inserting citations in Word and LibreOffice.
JabRef or Zotero?
Zotero is more convenient for collecting references from the browser and for working in Word. JabRef works directly on the bib file, so it suits anyone writing in LaTeX who wants the reference file to sit in the project folder and be managed in Git together with the text. Tip: for standards such as Eurocode, always record the number and year.
Related tools
To write LaTeX with a graphical interface — LyX. A modern LaTeX alternative that also reads BibTeX files — Typst. To convert documents between formats — Pandoc.
Zotero
Corporation for Digital Scholarship
Reference and bibliography manager — save papers and standards, annotate PDFs and cite automatically in Word.
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LyX
LyX team
A graphical LaTeX-based document editor — theses, papers and technical reports with equations.
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Typst
Typst
Modern typesetting for technical reports and equations — simpler syntax than LaTeX and instant compiling.
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Pandoc
John MacFarlane
A universal document converter — Markdown, Word, LaTeX, HTML and PDF, so a report is written once and exported anywhere.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
For anyone writing in LaTeX, JabRef is the natural reference manager: free, open, and it keeps your references in your own file.