BibDesk is a graphical bibliography manager for macOS, providing powerful BibTeX file management for Mac users. It is free and open-source. It is under active development by a small group of volunteer contributors and more are always welcome.
Some people (for example, professor Dan Sheffler and software developer Christian Tietze) have called BibDesk the best bibliography manager for macOS.
Have a question?
If you have a question about using BibDesk, please first check out the FAQ (frequently asked questions), then ask on the bibdesk-users mailing list if your question is still unanswered.
Check out one of these screencasts to see some of the ways people use BibDesk to manage their reference database:
Some tutorials written by users:
The current release of BibDesk requires macOS version 10.13 or higher.
Older releases of BibDesk are available (unsupported) that run on previous versions of Mac OS X (both PPC and Intel):
Mac OS X version | Latest BibDesk version |
---|---|
OS X / macOS 10.10, 10.11, 10.12 | 1.8.20 |
OS X 10.9 | 1.8.2 |
Mac OS X 10.7, 10.8 | 1.7.9 |
Mac OS X 10.6 | 1.6.22 |
Mac OS X 10.5 | 1.5.10 |
Mac OS X 10.4 | 1.3.22 |
Mac OS X 10.3 | 1.2.11 |
Mac OS X 10.2 | 1.1.8 |
See the BibDesk main page for download links and release notes.
The most current version's User Manual is available. This is the same information that's available from the Help menu inside BibDesk.
A SourceForge.net user account is required to edit pages. This is necessary to avoid regrettable wiki spam.
BibDesk is a community project, and wouldn't be nearly as good without people pitching in to help code, test, and write documentation. Thanks to all our contributors!
Wiki: BibDesk_Applescripts
Wiki: BibDesk_Localization
Wiki: BibDesk_Search_Groups
Wiki: Bug_Reporting_Guidelines
Wiki: Contributors
Wiki: Developer_Information
Wiki: FAQ
Wiki: Format_Citations_for_Editors
Wiki: Other_Applications
Wiki: Searching_the_Web
Wiki: Templates
Wiki: Tips_and_Tricks
Wiki: User_Screenshots