BibTeX to citations

BibTeX to citations

Paste one or more BibTeX records — the @article{...}, @book{...}, @inproceedings{...} entries exported by Zotero, Mendeley, Google Scholar or a LaTeX .bib file — and this tool turns them into a readable reference list in the citation style your paper or report actually needs. It reads the author, title, year and venue fields out of each record and rebuilds them as a proper citation, so you can go from a raw .bib export to a bibliography section without retyping anything by hand.

Choose APA, MLA, Chicago or ISO 690 from the style menu; each formats authors, dates and titles differently, and the tool keeps that formatting consistent across every entry in the list. Sort the list by author surname or by publication year, or leave it in the order the entries were pasted. Turn on numbering for a numbered reference list, abbreviate author first names to initials for a tighter citation, or cap the number of authors shown before the rest collapse into "et al." — useful for papers with a dozen co-authors. A separate toggle omits each record's abstract and keywords fields from the output, since most reference lists don't need them.

Entries missing a field their type requires — an article without a journal, a thesis without a school — are flagged inline with exactly which field is absent, so you catch an incomplete BibTeX export before it becomes a citation with a silent gap. Output can be plain text, Markdown (with journal and book titles wrapped in italics) or HTML, ready to drop into a document, a static site or a CMS field. Parenthesis-style @misc(...) entries and BibTeX's brace-nesting for preserving capitalization both parse correctly, and the list updates as you type or change an option.

Everything runs locally in your browser — your references are never uploaded anywhere, which matters for unpublished drafts and working bibliographies. Copy the result, download it as a .txt file, or send the output straight into another tool to keep formatting your document.

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