APAish export filter for JabRef

JabRef is an very nice program for managing bibtex bibliography databases. In addition to its use for managing and editing the .bib file, it also contains a number of export filters that can export the bibliography in a variety of styles. The export filter language is extensible, so that new styles can be added.

APAish represents my first effort at an export filter that follows the American Pychological Association (APA) guidelines, which are used by many journal and conference in the field of education. It exports the references in Rich Text Format (rtf) which is understood by a large variety of text editors (including Microsoft Word).

Actually, my long term goal is really to produce an export filter that is compatable with Erik Meijer's excellent bibtex style apacite. In particular, the goal is to have the RTF export filter look very close to the pdf generated when the bibliography is formatted with bibtex and apacite. There are still things to be done to reach that goal.

Installation Instructions

This assume that you have downloaded and installed JabRef from sourceforge. I have tested APAish with JabRef 2.5b1, so it should work with that version and later (and possibly with earlier versions).

Download APAish.zip to a place where you will remember it.

Open JabRef and select the menu item

Options > Manage
    Custom Exports

In the dialog box that appears, press the New button.

Fill out the dialog, in the middle box put the path to the APAish.layout file in the directory you just unziped. The last box should contain .rtf. The result should look something like this.

Screenshot of add export filter dialog

Select the database you want to export and select

File >
    Export

from the menu. APAish should now appear as one of the choices.

Release Notes

This is version 0.2, an early beta release of APAish. There are a number of known issues, some of which are related to missing features in JabRef (I've posted a couple of feature requests, I may try to add them myself later if I get time). At any rate here are a few extra and missing features.

APAish supports the lastchecked and url optional bibtex fields, adding a line of the form Retrieved lastchecked from url. to the entry if url is present.
APAish supports the doi field for articles and the isbn field for books.
APAish does not support the address field for the publisher of books. <flame>Adding the physical address of a publisher to a bibliography entry is an antemillenial practice that wastes valuable space in the paper.</flame>
APAish does not convert the TeX ligatures '---' and '--' to em-dashes and en-dashes. [This is missing functionality in the RTFChars filter in JabRef.] It also does not conver a single dash in a pages entry to an en-dash the way bibtex does.
APAish does not distinguish between single editors and multiple editors (both are labeled (ed.)). [I think a new kind of filter is needed in JabRef to accomplish this.] It also use pp. when there is only a single page.
The apacite package will add default values for the type field when not supplied by the entry. APAish does not do this. [Again, I think a new kind of filter is needed to support this.]
APAish does not yet support magazine, newspaper, lecture or intechreport entry types. The default layout will probably not work very well for these types. The misc, booklet, manual, unpublished and proceedings types also do not have custom filters, but should work reasonably well with the default filter.

I would like to hear about any problems that are not noted above. Patches are also welcome.

APAish is derived from the Harvard RTF export feature of JabRef and is available for free distribution under the same terms as JabRef.

almond@acm.org

Last modified: Sat Sep 26, 2009