KBib A Bibliography Manager for KDE

About

KBib is a bibliography reference manager for KDE. It uses BibTex as its native file format. KBib is written by Thach Nguyen and is distributed under the the terms of the GNU General Public License.

KBib was started in 2003 when I needed a program to edit/manage my BibTex files under Linux/KDE easily . At that time, Kbibtex did not exist. I found gbib but it was a GTK application and did not have some features that I wanted. So, I decided to write one by myself. To get it done quickly, the bibtex file processing code of gbib was reused in KBib. Since then, more features have been slowly added to KBib. From version 0.4, KBib was made publicly available with the hope that it would be useful to some people.

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Features:

• Add/edit/remove references
• Support copy/paste/drag-drop of references (BibTex entries can be copied/pasted or dragged/dropped from another Kbib window or a text editor into KBib and vice versus)
• Search and download references from Z39.50 servers, SRU servers, Pubmed server, IEEEXplore, ISI Web of Knowledge, Google Scholar, Citebase.org, ArXiv, Spires, Scitation, Optics InfoBase, Science Direct and MathSciNet.
• Download references from remote reference database (opened with Konqueror, Firefox), such as IEEEXplore, ScienceDirect (RIS format), Web of Science (ISI format), Google Scholar (RIS and Endnote formats) into KBib (see screenshot)
• Create new references from plain text, reference identifiers (DOI, ArXiv ID or Pubmed ID) and PDF files.
• Find/remove duplicated references
• Generate citation key automatically
• Check/correct duplicated citation keys
• Lock/unlock citation keys (to prevent unwanted change of citation keys)
• Sort references
• Search references(fairly simple)
• Cite selected references into Lyx/Kile (using Lyx pipe)
• Support string macros
• Import references from Bibtex/RIS/ISI/Endnote/COPAC/MODS XML/PubMed XML/Endnote exported Bibtex (without citation key) files
• Export to RIS/Endnote/MODS XML/HTML files
• Save selected references into a new file
• Support user defined reference types
• Add/Delete/Edit reference types
• Allow different view modes (view all/by reference type/selected references/unselected references)
• Group references by various properties. References can be grouped by reference type and any field (user defined). Group view can be disabled.
• Allow flexible displayed fields
• Generate bibliography from selected references

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Changelog

Version 0.6.6:

- New remote database searchers: OpticsInfoBase, ScienceDirect and MathSciNet
- Fixed Google Scholar and IEEEXplore searchers
- Updated DOI download to work with new authentication method in Crossref
- Minor UI tweaks

Version 0.6.5:

- New remote database searchers: ArXiv, Spires and Scitation
- Improved Google Scholar searcher
- Fixed problem with download reference from Crossref

Version 0.6.4:

- New remote database searchers: Google Scholar and Citebase.org
- Improved remote database search dialog: new tab to enter query string direcly, remember last search options
- New reference filter
- Fixed problem with locking citation keys
- Fixed problem with authentication when searching Z39.50 databases which require authentication

Version 0.6.3:

- Fix crashing when performing searching with white space (thanks Michael Martins for the fix)
- Fix lost of comment field beginning with white space after saving file
- Fix new reference from DOI. Crossref.org user name and password can be entered to allow crossref.org access
- Fix missing publisher field for book in default reference type definition table
- Add German translation (by Benjamin von Engelhardt)
- Make poppler optional. Without popper and poppler-qt, new reference from PDF files will be disable.

Version 0.6.2:

Usability improvements:
- Configuration dialog: add options to change the order of datasource
- Remote search dialog: double click to import an entry, press enter to start searching
- Reference editing dialog: ask to save data if close dialog with modified data
- New reference from text dialog: add option to add selected text to multiple value fields (e.g. authors, keywords)
Add option to cite selected references directly to Kile (version 2.0 or later) via DCOP
Add Turkish translation (by Serdar Soytetir)

Version 0.6.1:

New features:
- New references from identifiers: DOI (limitation: only the last name of the first author is available), ArXiV ID and PubMed ID
- New references from PDF files containing DOI or ArXiV codes
Bug fixes:
- Not updating groupview after adding new entries when starting KBib with a new document
- Not updating preview when an entry is selected by keyboard navigation
- Not active window after importing references
- Mouse on waiting state when opening RIS, ISI or Endnote files
- Sorting in groupview
- Some issues with converting to Latex code when importing references
- Crashing when opening some non-bibtex files
- Not active year search field in IEEEXplore searcher
- Compilation problem with yaz >= 3.0.0

Version 0.6:

- Added ISI Web of Knowledge search, databases supported: Web of Sciences and Current Content Connect
- Updated reference editing dialog, use different editing widgets for different field types
- Added reference field customisation
- Updated reference type customisation
- Added batch set field content operation
- Added replace string operation
- Added copy field content operation
- Improved reference downloading operation, a new session only starts when no session is running
- Added converting string macros into full string when displaying
- Changed Insert File command to Import File and moved to File menu

Version 0.5.4:

- Improved remote database search dialog.
- Added IEEEXplore search.
- Added global string macro table. String macros can be saved into a global list and imported in all new KBib sessions.
- Fixed the problem of occasional lost of string macros after saving file.

NOTE: KBib 0.5.4 does not use reference type definition table defined by previous versions (if there is any). If you modified the reference type definition table, you should do it again in KBib 0.5.4

Version 0.5.3:

- Added remote database searching. Z39.50, SRU and Pubmed databases can be searched.
- Added dialog to create new reference from plain text.
- Improved ISI importer.
- Fixed crashing when opening some non-BibTex file directly. - Fixed some minor bugs.

Version 0.5.2:

- Added UTF8 encoding support. KBib now can open, display and save BibTex file with UTF8 encoding characters correctly.
- Fixed missing keywords when importing references from certain websites.

Version 0.5.1:

- Added preamble support.
- Added exporting to MODS, HTML and importing from Pubmed (XML), MODS, COPAC files (import/export filters are now based on bibutils 3.27)
- Added auto text completion for authors, editors, journal and keywords fields in reference editing dialog
- Added note editing in reference editor, long, multiline notes, comments or reviews can be added to references
- Added link to local file and DOI functions
- Added option in configuration dialog to control how to compare two references
- Added option to control how the authors to be displayed in the main view
- Added option to set the keyword separator
- Added menu entry to copy selected references as formated string
- Fixed crashing when opening files saved by Jabref

Version 0.5:

- Added groupview
- Added field delimiter option in configuration dialog. Different delimiter can be used when writing BibTex file.
- Fixed missing year when importing ISI file or downloading references from ISI Web of Knowledge.
- Fixed problem of opening URL with space or &
- Internal code refactoring and minor bug fixes

Version 0.4.2:

- Fixed problem of opening files with undefined reference type.
- Fixed reference editing dialog. Newly entered data is not lost when changing reference type.
- Fixed problem of crashing when create citation key with empty author.
- Undefined fields now read in as extra fields.

Version 0.4.1:

- Fixed mime type definitions so that references from remote reference database can be downloaded into KBib.
- Fixed missing files and directories.