Tools to manipulate BibTeX (.bib) files/bibliographies?

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#1

Hey collective UChicago Grad intelligence

I am looking for recommendations on tools that people doing research use to manipulate their bibliography databases. Yesterday, for sharing a bibliography of relevant papers with a collaborator, I ended up using http://www.jabref.org/ for manipulating my .bib file, that seemed okay but pretty clunky for a software I would want to use on a frequent basis. Furthermore, the HTML export feature just didn’t work and I had to force quit the application each time I tried.

Any suggestions on other tools that you may have come to like over the years?

#2

I use Bibdesk. It’s reasonably okay. But I’ve found myself just manually editing the .bib file through a text editor more and more.

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#3

Wow, thanks! BibDesk seems so much more usable. Too bad that it is macOS only, however.

#4

I use JabRef when I have to, but most often I just open up the .bib file in my LaTeX editor and copy the reference from MathSciNet’s MR lookup because the citations are very high quality. I’m not sure how they hold up for fields that aren’t math/theoretical CS…

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#5

I just edit .bib files in a text editor