Searching

There are three different search modes in JabRef.

CTRL-F opens or focuses the search interface. Pressing CTRL-F several times toggles search mode. When searching incrementally, pressing CTRL-F makes the program search for the next occurence of the search string.

CTRL-SHIFT-F opens or focuses the search interface, and selects incremental search. When searching incrementally, CTRL-SHIFT-F also finds the next occurence of the search string.

Incremental search

When searching incrementally, the program searches immediately each time you press a letter. The status line informs you about the success of the search. Pressing the search shortcut keys causes the program to find the next occurence of the current search string. If no further occurences can be found, the status line will notify you about this. Repeating the search again causes the search to restart at the top. The search order always follows the current sorting of your database. To escape an incremental search, press ESC or click "Clear search".

Highlight search

In highlight search, the program searches your database for all occurences of your search string, once you press ENTER. All entries that match are selected.

Float search

Float search is similar to highlight search, except that the entries that match will not be selected, but instead will be moved to the top of the table. Entries which do not match will end up below the ones that do, and in addition will be displayed in gray. To stop displaying the search results, press ESC or click "Clear search".

Field specification, logical operators

In order to search specific fields only and/or include logical operators in the search expression, a special syntax is available in which these can be specified. E.g. to search for entries whose author is "Miller", enter (in any but incremental search mode):

author = miller

Both the field specification and the search term support regular expressions. If the search term contains spaces, enclose it in quotes. Do not use spaces in the field specification! E.g. to search for entries about image processing, type:

title|keywords = "image processing"

You can use "and", "or", "not", and braces as expected:

(author = miller or title|keywords = "image processing") and not author = brown

The "=" sign is actually a shorthand for "contains". Searching for an exact match is possible using "matches" or "==". Using "!=" tests if the search term is not contained in the field (equivalent to "not ... contains ..."). The selection of field types to search (required, optional, all) is always overruled by the field specification in the search expression. To search for entries of a certain type, a pseudo field called "entrytype" is available:

entrytype = thesis

This finds entries whose type (as displayed in the "Entrytype" column) contains the word "thesis" (which would be "phdthesis" and "mastersthesis").

Search settings

The Settings button opens a menu showing the settings for your search. Settings include limiting which fields are searched, deciding whether your search string should be interpreted as a regular expression, and deciding whether the search should be case-sensitive.