cb2bib

cb2bib is an approachable and intuitive software tool that allows you to easily extract unformatted bibliographic references from email notifications, journal web pages, and PDF files. It offers support for BibTeX files.

Hassle-free installer and clear-cut GUI

The setup procedure is pretty fast and simple. The only notable aspect about it is that cb2bib offers to associate itself with BibTeX files (.bib format).
As far as the interface is concerned, the utility adopts a large window with a neatly organized structure that invites you to open a BibTeX file to view and edit its content.

View and edit BibTeX files

It's possible to modify the CITEID, document type (e.g. article, booklet, conference), title, author, journal, pages, volume, number, year, abstract, keywords and file, in addition to other files, like the organization, series, address, edition, institution, publisher, and URL.

Find and extract references

When scanning a BibTeX file for references, you can specify a search pattern, enable or disable case sensitive mode, select the search type (e.g. approximate or fixed string) and scope (e.g. author, edition), as well as ask the app to simplify the source, verify the linked documents, and scan all BibTeX items or just the current one.
References may be imported from PDF documents, and you can perform network queries. What's more, the utility can be set to guess the bibliographic fields, restart the recognition process, edit bookmarks, journal abbreviations and regular expressions, or show tagged Clipboard data.

Evaluation and conclusion

The application didn't hamper system resources in our tests, since it needed low CPU and RAM to work properly. However, it froze, prompted an error and crashed on a couple of occasions while we were browsing network locations for BibTeX files to open. Nevertheless, cb2bib provides you with practical tools for viewing and editing BibTeX files.