refbase Reviews in 2026

Audience

Anyone searching for a web reference database solution

About refbase

refbase can import and export references in various formats (including BibTeX, Endnote, RIS, PubMed, ISI Web of Science, CSA Illumina, RefWorks, MODS XML, OpenOffice, and MS Word). It can make formatted lists of citations in HTML, RTF, PDF, or LaTeX, and offers powerful searching, and RSS support. Its OpenSearch and SRU/W web services, and support for unAPI & COinS metadata allow for easy access by clients and search engines. Please see our Feature highlights page for a more detailed description of features. An overview of the major feature additions in refbase-0.9.5 is given here. You can download the stable release version of refbase from the SourceForge download page. Please see the instructions on how to install or update refbase. The latest source code can be checked out and installed from the refbase Subversion repository. We invite you to test-drive refbase at the refbase Demo Database (latest stable release version) or the refbase Beta Database (latest development version).

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JabRef was founded 2003 and has since been used by many students and researchers. Our mission is to advance knowledge and improve scientific research. We value open access to information and believe modern science can built on an open institutional structure. This is why we develop JabRef as free open-source software and save your data in a simple text-based file format with no vendor lock-in. Fetch complete bibliographic information based on ISBN, DOI, PubMed-ID and arXiv-ID. Complete and improve bibliographic data by comparing with curated online catalogues such as Google Scholar, Springer or MathSciNet. Automatically rename and move associated files according to customizable rules. Customize and add new metadata fields or reference types. Organize articles based on keywords, tags, search terms or your manual assignments. Native BibTeX and BibLaTeX support, perfect for text-based typesetting systems such as LaTeX and Markdown.

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Referencer

Referencer is a GNOME application to organize documents or references, and ultimately generate a BibTeX bibliography file. It is designed with the scientist/researcher in mind, and "document" may be taken to mean "paper" in general, although Referencer can deal with any kind of document that BibTeX can. Chief among Referencer's capabilities is the automatic acquisition of bibliographic information (metadata) for some kinds of documents. Upon adding a PDF file to a Referencer library file, it will automatically be searched for key identifiers such as a DOI code or arXiv identifier. If either of these is found, Referencer will attempt to retrieve the metadata for the document via the internet. However, metadata fetching for newer additions to arXiv is broken because of the change of format. Import from BibTeX, Reference Manager and EndNote. Referencer will automatically retrieve arXiv, PubMed and CrossRef metadata for PDF documents which have arXiv ID or DOI code.

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EndNote

Did you know that researchers waste nearly 200,000 hours per year formatting citations? Imagine if you could have that time back to spend on your research. EndNote 20 accelerates your research process so you can focus on what truly matters – conducting and sharing groundbreaking research. Easily collaborate across geographic boundaries. Share some or all of your library and set permissions for access. Use tools that find PDFs for you throughout your search process. Then, easily read, review, annotate and search PDFs in your library. Match your paper with relevant, reputable journals using Manuscript Matcher. Create rules to automatically organize references as you work. And, use the new Tabs feature for easier multitasking.

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BibSonomy

Using BibSonomy you can easily create collections of bookmark and publication posts. Just insert bookmarks and publications. You can do this even faster with our BibSonomy browser add-ons or bookmarklets. In addition, you can also use ISBN, ISSN, DOI, or barcodes to have the insert publication form filled up automatically for you. Use tags to organize the posts in your collection. If you choose them carefully, tags are a very powerful instrument. Learn more about tagging in BibSonomy. BibSonomy helps you create bibligraphies for scientific papers. If you use a specific tag for each bibliography and assign it to all your paper posts accordingly, you can use the tag to find all papers of the bibliography. Afterwards, you can export your publication list in the desired format. BibSonomy supports a lot of formats, e. g. Microsoft Word Reference Manager, EndNote, and BibTeX.

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