BibTeX, RIS & CSL-JSON Converter

Every reference manager stores the same facts about a source — who wrote it, what it is called, where and when it appeared — but each exchanges them in its own format. LaTeX and Overleaf use BibTeX, EndNote and most databases export RIS, and Zotero, Pandoc and citation processors speak CSL-JSON. This converter moves references between the three and can also print them straight away as a formatted reference list.

The three formats in brief

BibTeX entries look like @article{key, author = {Last, First and Last, First}, ...}. The key is what \cite{key} refers to in a LaTeX document. RIS is a plain list of two-letter tags, one per line: TY - JOUR starts a record, AU holds one author, TI the title, SP and EP the first and last page, and ER ends the record. CSL-JSON is an array of objects with fields such as author, issued and container-title, designed for the Citation Style Language used by Zotero and Mendeley.

What the BibTeX reader understands

Real .bib files are messier than the examples in manuals. The reader handles values in braces or quotes, bare numbers, @string abbreviations (so journal = nat becomes Nature when @string{nat = "Nature"} is defined), # joins, and month macros such as mar. LaTeX markup is decoded: M{\"u}ller becomes Müller, -- becomes an en dash, \& an ampersand, and commands like \emph{} are unwrapped. Names in “Last, First” or “First Last” order are both read, with particles such as van and de kept in the surname.

Choosing the output

Pick BibTeX, RIS or CSL-JSON to move a library, or one of APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago, Harvard and IEEE to get a reference list you can paste into a document. When writing BibTeX you can ask for accents as LaTeX commands, which classic BibTeX needs; leave it off for BibLaTeX with Biber, which reads UTF-8 directly.

How types are mapped

Internally each reference becomes one of five types: journal article, book, web page, news article or video. @article, JOUR and article-journal map to each other exactly, as do books, web pages and newspaper articles. Conference papers become journal-style articles with the proceedings as the container, and chapters, theses and reports become books. That keeps the essentials but loses the distinction, so look at those entries after converting.

Checking the result

The table under the output lists the key, type, authors, year, title, container and DOI read from each reference. Scan it before importing: a missing year usually means an unusual date field, and a title in the author column means the record was malformed in the source. Warnings appear for entries without a title.

A quick test

The sample has Watson and Crick’s 1953 Nature article and a book. Converted to RIS, the article becomes TY - JOUR with two AU lines, SP - 737 and EP - 738; converted to Harvard, it reads “Watson, J.D. and Crick, F.H.C. (1953) ‘Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids…’, Nature, 171(4356), pp. 737–738.” followed by its DOI link.

Related tools

Format a full reference list with hanging indents and Word export in the Bibliography Formatter, build single citations in the Citation Generator, make Wikipedia templates with the Wikipedia Citation Generator, or organise sources for a review in the Literature Matrix Builder.