BibTeX, biblatex and biber ⇒ Importing into bibtex from text

[saimike]

I have some citations in APA format in a word doc (so the indent, italics, etc also follow APA) which I would like to import into bibtex. How can this be done?

[kaiserkarl13]

I usually prefer to do those sorts of things manually, but some conversion scripts do exist (you will just have to check them manually afterwards).

For example, http://www.snowelm.com/~t/doc/tips/makebib.en.html has one such script built into it. I find that correcting it takes almost as much time as making the entry manually. For example,

Code: Select all

Smith R J, Doe J M and Jones B D 2020 Annu. Rev. Mater. Res. 3 274-483

gets translated to

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@article{2008annu,
 author = "Smith R J and Doe J M and Jones B D",
 title = "Annu",
 journal = "Rev. Mater. Res",
 volume = "3",
 year = 2020
}

when it should be,

Code: Select all

@article{2008annu,
 author = "Smith, R. J. and Doe, J. M. and Jones, B. D.",
 journal = "Annu.\ Rev.\ Mater.\ Res",
 volume = "3",
 year = 2020
}

The commas are the most important thing it left out, though the journal entry is wrong too, of course. I don't blame the script author---quite frankly, it works extremely well given the complexity of the problem. After all, BibTeX was written specifically to solve that same problem!

Note also that some text editors will generate a BibTeX skeleton entry for you, so all you need do is paste into each field.