JabRef

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JabRef is a free, open-source, cross-platform reference and bibliography manager, particularly well suited to researchers, academics, and anyone working with LaTeX. Its core format is BibTeX/BibLaTeX, so bibliographic data remains in a simple, human-readable text file rather than a proprietary database. JabRef can collect references from sources such as Crossref, Google Scholar, MathSciNet, Springer, arXiv and zbMATH, retrieve metadata from DOI/ISBN/arXiv identifiers, extract information from PDFs, and import references through its browser extension.

For organizing research, JabRef provides hierarchical collections, tags, powerful searching and filtering, duplicate detection, PDF/document management, automatic citation-key generation and thousands of citation styles. It integrates with LaTeX, Word, LibreOffice and several editors, while its text-based files also work well with Git and other version-control systems. Recent development has expanded its tooling further, including experimental Git integration and VS Code/LSP support. Overall, JabRef is designed around open formats, reproducibility and avoiding vendor lock-in, making it particularly attractive for mathematics and computer-science researchers who maintain large BibTeX libraries.

Jabref