I’ve spent most of the day with the boring task of doing literature research. I had set up a database and a webform already, so that I could submit all necessary information and create a suitable bibtex file with a small php script.

After Sebastian’s praise of JabRef, I’ve decided to give it a try. I downloaded the latest beta version and well, it is really beta. At first it could not save my imported literatur.bib file because I was using an unknown url type. This was easily fixed through changing all those entry types to misc. There were more serious issues, like disappearing entries when you paste and copy lots of entries or when you click on the generate bibkey button two times. The citeseer import did not work most of the times either. The 0.6 version is much more stable though, so if you care for your entries, you should probably switch to that version. But I agree, it is a nice tool and hopefully they are able to improve overall stability.