JabRef Citation Creator

Founded in 2003, JabRef is a free citation creator. It allows the user to easily import, edit, search, and group citations in the BibTeX format.  It also offers automatic key generation.  Specifications for each style are given by the chosen style file. JabRef can be used on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Install your JabRef Citation Creator

Visit, downloads.jabref.org, download the installer for your operating system then run them and follow the on-screen instructions.

The portable version of the JabRef citation creator is designed to be run from a USB stick (or similar) with no installation. Download it from downloads.jabref.org. These are generic archive files that need to be extracted. Hence, inside the archive files, you will find the file needed to run JabRef.

After which you can activate by clicking on Options → Preferences → General.

Then…

a.) Create a new library, just select the “New library” menu item in the “File” menu.

b.) The main screen is now showing an empty “entry table”.

c.) Then, add a new entry manually: select “Library” -> “New entry”, click on the icon in the icon bar, or just hit CTRL-N.

d.) This opens a dialog where you can select the type of reference you want to store. By default all entry types defined by the BibTeX format are available.

e.) After clicking on the button of choice, the dialog closes and the so-called “Entry Editor” is opens for the newly created entry.

f.) The most important information about the references to be added can now be entered in the “Required Fields” tab. Next, generate the citation key. The default key pattern is [author] [year], which means that Author information is followed by the year of the publication, resulting in the example in Turing1950.

g.) After entering some information, you can see on the right side of the entry editor a preview of the bibliographic data

Populating your JabRef Citation Creator

First method: Add source manually

• To add a new entry, select Library → New entry, press CTRL+N, or click on the dedicated icon of the toolbar.

• A dialog window is displayed. By default, 5 common types of entries are displayed:

• The window for selecting default entry types. Note: the actual content of the “others” menu depends on the database mode.

• For other types of entries, click on Others. That expands the window and displays the other entry types available:

• Window with all available entry types. Note: the actual content of the “others” menu depends on the database mode.

• Finally, the window opens and lets you fill in the various fields.

• You can directly create a new entry of a specific entry type by using a keyboard shortcut. We strongly recommend learning the shortcuts for the entry types you use most often, e.g. Ctrl + Shift + A for adding an article entry.​ See Options → Customize key bindings.

Second method: Add an entry using its identifier

• First, click on Library → New entry. You may also click on the New entry button, or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL + N.
• In the lower part of the window, there are two boxes: “ID type” and “ID”. In the field “ID type”, you can select the desired identifier, e.g. “ISBN” (it works also for DOI).
• Then enter the identifier in the textbox below and press Enter. That will generate an entry based on the given ID (you can also click on “Generate”). The entry is then added to your library and opened in the entry editor. In case an error occurs, a popup is shown.

Third method: You can also add an entry by simply pasting its BibTex or its DOI from your clipboard to the main table.

Fourth method: Entry using reference text

Fifth method: In case you have a reference string, convert the text to BibTeX.

• Start by clicking Library then selecting “New entry from plain text…” Alternatively, you can press Ctrl+Shift+N.

• Next, wait until “Plain Reference Parser” window opens

• Afterwards, paste the reference text

• Finally, click “Add to current library”

• The result is selected in the entry table.

​​Sixth method: Using the Browser Extension as a citation creator

The official browser extension automatically identifies and extracts bibliographic information on websites and sends them to the JabRef citation creator with one click. When you find an interesting article through Google Scholar, the arXiv, or journal websites, this browser extension allows you to add those references to JabRef. Even links to accompanying PDFs are sent to JabRef, where those documents can easily be downloaded, renamed, in addition to placement in the correct folder.

Export to Microsoft Word

You can import your citations into a Microsoft Word document through JabRef citation creator’s export feature. Please follow the steps below for instructions on how to export your JabRef sources into a Microsoft Word document:

a.) Select the “File” tab in the upper lefthand corner of JabRef, hover over “Export”, and select “Export selected entries”. Be sure to save your file as a “MS Office 2007” file.

b.) Secondly, open Microsoft Word and click on the “References” tab.

c.) Then select “Manage Sources”, click “Browse”, and locate the desired file. The file type should be an XML document.

Mac OS users will not see a “Manage Sources” button. Mac users should follow these steps:

a.) Copy the selected file to /Library/Containers/com.Microsoft.word/Data/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office or to /Users//Library/Containers/com. Microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/ and name it Sources.xml

b.) Before you continue, restart Word

c.) Select “References”, and then select “Citations”

d.) Consequently, a sidebar will open on the right side of the window. Click the icon with three dots.

e.) Then, click “Citation Sources Manager” from the drop-down bar.

f.) Next continue by copying over your citations from the master’s list.

g.) Finally, click on “Bibliography” under the “References” tab to add your cited sources.

JabRef can be a little daunting but feel free to contact us for guidance.