Managing References in BibTex

Properly formatting references in a paper is important. I use Latex for typesetting all my papers and that is why BibTeX is a major part of adding references to the paper. Well, the challenge is that I want to have one master copy of a bib file that has all the references from all my papers. This is useful for writing a thesis as well as other papers that may reuse some of the references from an older paper. I tried several reference management software like Mendeley but never ended up using them for a long time. I wanted something simple and I thought of writing the code for parsing the bib entries myself. Then, I found Jabref software. It is a very simple software and has all the functionality that I need for reference management. Note, I am not advocating for any one software over the other, just writing about what I liked in Jabref.

1. It is easy to merge two bib files. It can find duplicates. You can merge the duplicates or choose to keep any one version.

2. I use the bib keys in the following format: [name][year][veryshorttitle] This is the same format how Google scholar produces keys.

3. The title field needs to be in curly brackets to keep them initial capitalized. This can be checked using reference integrity checker. I was really surprized by this feature.