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New (custom) bibtex fields #15536

@ThiloteE

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@ThiloteE

We have bibliographic metadata that is created by users of JabRef, not the original author of the entry. We need to store this information somewhere.

So far, one option is/was to cache some information and not store it in the .bib file. This means, we lack persistence. Another option has been to utilize the comment-user field, such as in #15316. We also already make use of some custom bibtex fields that can be found in the General tab. (Sometimes I wonder, if we should rename that tab to JabRef fields or something like that, but that's a different issue).

Example for data that might be worthy of deserving their own field(s):

  • references extracted from pdf files, such as references cited in and references cited by (can be found in Citations tab). Possible bibtex fields are described in https://docs.jabref.org/advanced/entryeditor/entrylinks. E.g. cited or related
  • entries from related articles tab
  • AI summarizations
  • AI chat

When it comes to question if we should make a difference between user generated data and original "official" data created by the authors of the metadata item, I am in favor of doing so, for the following reason: If the field can be spelled without an abbreviation, then don't abbreviate it. Computers can easily shorten words, but not the other way. Computers can easily strip information from something, but adding new information requires work. Either compute or manual work. This follows the philosophy of the OpenStreetMap project with regard to abbreviations: "If the name can be spelled without an abbreviation, then don't abbreviate it. Computers can easily shorten words, but not the other way (St. could be Street or Saint)."

Having an "user-mode" vs. an "author-mode" might be something worth exploring.

This is just a rough idea and would require a proper ADR, if somebody wants to work on this. We already have two for AI related fields that opted to NOT store data in a bibtex field: https://devdocs.jabref.org/decisions/0032-store-chats-in-local-user-folder.html and https://devdocs.jabref.org/decisions/0033-store-chats-in-mvstore.html

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