/JabRef-Browser-Extension

Browser extension for JabRef to allow importing of new items directly from the browser.

Primary LanguageJavaScriptGNU Affero General Public License v3.0AGPL-3.0

JabRef Browser Extension

Firefox - Chrome - Edge - Vivaldi

Browser extension for users of the bibliographic reference manager JabRef. It automatically identifies and extracts bibliographic information on websites and sends them to JabRef with one click.

When you find an interesting article through Google Scholar, the arXiv or journal websites, this browser extension allows you to add those references to JabRef. Even links to accompanying PDFs are sent to JabRef, where those documents can easily be downloaded, renamed and placed in the correct folder. A wide range of publisher sites, library catalogs and databases are supported.

Please post any issues or suggestions here on GitHub.

Installation and Configuration

Normally, you simply install the extension from the browser store and are ready to go.

Firefox - Chrome - Edge - Vivaldi

Sometimes, a manual installation is necessary (e.g. if you use the portable version of JabRef). In this case, please follow the steps described in the user manual.

Usage

After the installation, you should be able to import bibliographic references into JabRef directly from your browser. Just visit a publisher site or some other website containing bibliographic information (for example, the arXiv) and click the JabRef symbol in the Firefox search bar (or press Alt+Shift+J). Once the JabRef browser extension has extracted the references and downloaded the associated PDF's, the import window of JabRef opens.

You might want to configure JabRef so that new entries are always imported in an already opened instance of JabRef. For this, activate "Remote operation" under the Network tab in the JabRef Preferences.

About this Add-On

Internally, this browser extension uses the magic of Zotero's site translators. Thus most of the credit has to go to the Zotero development team and to the many authors of the site translators collection. Note that this browser extension does not make any changes to the Zotero database and thus both plug-ins coexist happily with each other.

Contributing to the Development

JabRef browser extension uses the WebExtensions API.

Preparation:

  1. Install Node.js (e.g., choco install nodejs)
  2. Install gulp and web-ext: npm install --global gulp-cli web-ext
  3. Fork the repository.
  4. Checkout the repository.
  5. Install development dependencies via npm install.
  6. Start browser with the add-on activated: Firefox: npm run dev:firefox Chrome: npm run dev:opera

Now just follow the typical steps to contribute code:

  1. Create your feature branch: git checkout -b my-new-feature
  2. Build and run the add-on as described above.
  3. Commit your changes: git commit -am 'Add some feature'
  4. Push to the branch: git push origin my-new-feature
  5. Submit a pull request.

To update dependencies:

  • npm outdated gives an overview of outdated packages (doc)

  • npm-upgrade updates all packages

  • npm install install updated packages

  • running

     git subtree pull --prefix zotero-connectors https://github.com/zotero/zotero-connectors.git master --squash
 git subtree pull --prefix zotero-connectors/src/zotero https://github.com/zotero/zotero.git master --squash
 git subtree pull --prefix zotero-connectors/src/translate https://github.com/zotero/translate.git master --squash
 git subtree pull --prefix zotero-connectors/src/utilities https://github.com/zotero/utilities.git master --squash
 git subtree pull --prefix zotero-scholar-citations https://github.com/MaxKuehn/zotero-scholar-citations.git master --squash

    updates the zotero-connectors submodule and the zotero-scholar-citations submodule

  • gulp update-external-scripts copies and post-processes the scripts in the folders zotero-connectors and zotero-scholar-citations to the folder external-scripts

Release of new version