BibTeX has been widely in use since its introduction by Oren Patashnik 20 years ago. As the name suggests, it was intended to be used in combination with the typesetting system LaTeX, but it has become possible, for instance, to include BibTeX-bibliograph
For any academic/research writing, incorporating your references into your document is an important task. Fortunately, as Latex was aimed for this sort of work, it has a variety of features that make dealing with your references much simpler.
JabRef is an open source bibliography reference manager. The native file format used by JabRef is BibTeX, the standard LaTeX bibliography format. JabRef runs on the Java VM (version 1.4.2 or greater), and should work equally well on Windows, Linux and Mac