Plain citations parser giving unrelated citations back. How come? Attached a test case

[bwakkie]

JabRef version

Other (please describe below)

Operating system

GNU / Linux

Details on version and operating system

JabRef 5.16--2024-07-25--771c4cd Linux 6.12.20-2-manjaro amd64 Java 21.0.2 JavaFX 22.0.2+4

Checked with the latest development build (copy version output from About dialog)

• I made a backup of my libraries before testing the latest development version.
• I have tested the latest development version and the problem persists

Steps to reproduce the behaviour

JabRef 5.16

There is a problem with the text parser which is changing the citations completely into a not related citations.
I created a test case see two attached files.

testcase.txt

testcase.bib.txt

How come this totally different citations are matched? Is there a way to parse the strings without the use of grobid? As I think blindly trusting grobid is wrong. At least verify the whole title string would already help to see something is not right.

Appendix

No response

[InAnYan]

Hi! Thanks for checking out JabRef and its text parser! I have worked on this feature for some time.

TL;DR: Plain citation parsing in JabRef works not very well (rule-based parser is underdeveloped (it's hard to develop rule-based algorithms), Grobid gives irrelevant entries, LLM is hard to set up).

We call this thing - plain citations parser (sometimes plain references parser).

In JabRef 5.16 there are 2 methods how you can parse citations: rule-based and Grobid. As we've experimented a lot of times (see ¹, ², ³), both parsers give not-so-good results. Grobid quite often gives irrelevant entries (actually, for some time JabRef's Grobid instance was down ⁴) - this is what you might experience.

In the new version of JabRef (6.0-alpha), we have added warnings about confabulations of plain citation parsing ⁵ and expanded the documentation: ⁶. One could also use LLM to parse citations ⁷, people (including me) say it works good-enough ⁸, ⁹.

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/JabRef/jabref/issues/11805 ↩

2. https://github.com/JabRef/jabref/issues/12211 ↩

3. https://github.com/JabRef/jabref/issues/6672 ↩

4. https://github.com/JabRef/jabref/issues/12211 ↩

5. https://github.com/JabRef/jabref/issues/11825 ↩

6. https://docs.jabref.org/collect/newentryfromplaintext ↩

7. https://docs.jabref.org/collect/newentryfromplaintext#llm ↩

8. https://github.com/JabRef/jabref/issues/11805#issuecomment-2445963839 ↩

9. https://github.com/JabRef/jabref/issues/12211#issuecomment-2484934246 ↩

[Bha2912]

Hello! I’m interested in working on this issue. Let me know if I can take it up.

[InAnYan]

@Bha2912, this issue is not marked as good first issue (or with other labels). And we currently don't have a plan of solving it (it's in the discussion state).

So, for now, you can look at other issues

[bwakkie]

Hi @InAnYan I changed the title accordingly based on your comments.

I know how difficult it is as I am doing my best with vim and regexes myself for years. But what grobid returns at the moment is in my opinion not worth it.
I know though that grobid can be trained but it goes a bit over my head now/how. I have my own grobid server running and it gives similar problems hence I was looking for an alternative solution.

I used the JabRef development version for the next test based on the above original text input. The grobid had just 10% correct and 90% was complete garbage which makes me not to trust the grobid parser system one bit for now.

For the rules based result I see that at each line the previous author is pasted back in the author fields

testcase_rulebased.bib.txt

anystyle.io helped in my case, would this way of dealing with plain citations not be a better idea?
e.g. parse -> show user -> user fix -> parser learns -> include to a library