Our of my experience, JabRef combined with BibTex is a good combination for writing scientific articles.

Cheers and see you one of these days!

Antonio

@Victor

Thanks for the comments - I’ll certainly give Mendeley another try once you get out of Beta.

As for the version, I was using version 0.9.2.1 for Ubuntu - So I guess the bug is not quite fixed yet.

@Sebastian

Thanks for the configuration hint. I just tried to import a regular bibtex file.

To be honest, I didn’t play with the configuration menu, or search the forums, because after Zotero locked, I went on Jabref, and since it worked out of the box I decided to go finish my paper that day instead of trying to fix the problem.

I agree with you that the best solution depends on the setup. I’m using just the default latex + bibtex, so I guess I’ll stick with jabref for a while - when I have some downtime I’ll try to find what went wrong with Zotero

@noksagt

Thanks for the configuration hint!

By choking I meant that zotero showed the “loading” bar, and then it (and Firefox) became unresponsive - I think the longest I waited was 5 or 10 minutes while doing other stuff. My bibfile is not large (I think), about 200-300 entries.

Thanks for the explanation about the utility of writing metadata. Now it makes a lot of sense.

@Mr. Gunn

Like I said on the report, Mendeley did not generate an error message or an error log, so I’m really not sure what I could say to the support department. I tried to use v.0.9.2.1 with Ubuntu 8.04 and Gnome 2.22.3, if that helps any. If there is any other information that you might need, feel free to ask

We’d really like to be your reference manager of choice, so would you please get in touch with support@mendeley.com to see if they can get to the bottom of your crash problems?

What do you mean by it choking on your bib file? How large was the file and how long did you wait?

JabRef’s ability to write metadata proves useful when you use other programs to search for PDFs.

What type of file did you try to import? Did you look for help on the forums?

A lot of this also has to do with what word processor you want to use - if you’re not writing in LaTeX, using jabref is a bit of a weird choice, because it doesn’t give you any word-processor integration.
If you’re writing in LaTeX, jabref with bibtex is probably your best choice, although you may still miss Zotero’s ability to get references quickly of the web and use its bibtex export.

thanks for trying Mendeley and writing up the review! Very sorry for the trouble you experienced. As we prepare to leave the “beta” status within the next two months, increasing the stability is our main priority - the next release should eliminate most bugs that lead to crashing.

In order to avoid any potential data losses, the next release will automatically create local backups of your database, as well as include a “restore from/to server” functionality.

Regarding the keyword search bug: This was a known bug in 0.9.2, but should have been fixed in the current version 0.9.2.1 - is that the one you were using? You’re on Ubuntu, right?

Thanks again and best wishes,
Victor