The JabRef main window

Note: most menu actions referred in the following have keyboard shortcuts, and many are available from the toolbar. The keyboard shortcuts are found in the pull-down menus.

This is the main window from where you work with your databases. Below the menubar and the toolbar is a tabbed pane containing a panel for each of your currently open databases. When you select one of these panels, a table appears, listing all the database's entries, as well as a configurable selection of their fields.

You decide which fields are shown in the table by checking the fields you want to see in the Preferences dialog.
Fields can be edited directly in the table, by simply clicking on a cell and typing the contents (this edition mode is possible only if "Allow editing in table cells" is selected in Options --> Preferences --> General). Double-click a cell to enter a more powerful edit mode. You can navigate the table with the arrow keys.
The table is sorted according to a field of your choosing. Simply press the header of a column to sort entries according to the column's field. Press the column again to toggle the sort direction. Entries with equal content in the selected field are sorted according to the secondary (and possibly the tertiary) sort field, which can be set in the Preferences dialog.
Adjust the width of each column by dragging the borders between their headers.
In the Preferences dialog, toggle whether the table should be resized to fit the window. Enable this to ensure visibility of the whole table, and disable it to make room for displaying more information.
Color codes can be toggled in the Preferences dialog, and they help you visualize the completeness of your database by coloring cells as follows:
- A red cell in the leftmost column denotes an incomplete entry.
- A yellow cell in the leftmost column denotes an entry that doesn't define all required fields by itself, but that contains a cross-reference.
- A blue cell denotes a required field.
- A green cell denotes an optional field.
- An uncolored cell denotes a field which is not used by the bibtex program for this type of entry. The field can still be edited in JabRef.

Adding a new entry

There are several ways to add a new entry. The New entry menu action shows a dialog where you can choose the type of the entry from a list. To bypass this dialog, there are also separate menu actions for each entry type, and keyboard shortcuts for the most common types.

When a new entry is added, by default an editor dialog for the entry will be opened. This behaviour can be toggled in the Preferences dialog.

Note: We strongly recommend learning the shortcuts for the entry types you use most often, e.g. CTRL-SHIFT-A for adding an article entry.

Editing an entry

To open an editor dialog for an existing entry, simply double-click in the leftmost column of the appropriate line, or select the entry and press ENTER. If "Allow editing in table cells" is not selected in the dialog window Options --> Preferences --> General, a double-click anywhere on the appropriate line will open the editor dialog.

Referencing a bibtex string in a field

In JabRef you write the contents of all fields the same way as you would in a text editor, with one exception: to reference a string, enclose the name of the string in a set of # characters, e.g.:
'#jan# 1997',
which will be interpreted as the string named 'jan' followed by ' 1997'.