Convert a document's works cited to bibtex or endnote formats [closed]

Question

I have a text document (word or pdf) which has a long list of works cited. How can the works cited be export to bibtex or endnote?

Answer 1

You are spoilt for choice. Google for "reference metadata extraction" and start clicking.

There's free software to extract from PDFs: see Metadata Extraction Tool.

If you have a Word 2007 file, that has (at last) a standardised representation of reflist entries, and EndNote can extract reliably from it.

If you just want to see the citations in an article, RefRuns is a useful tool, and has a simple web interface.

Answer 2

After downloading the Metadata Extraction Tool, I discovered it captures the metadata a of particular object (file name, size, date, etc.); it does not look at the references inside that object and extract them.

The best solution I've found for scraping references from Word and Pdf files is cb2Bib.

Answer 3

You may try WordToBibTeX.

I used it once to convert my old Word bibliography file to BibTeX. :)

The usual path of the word xml bibliography file is something like: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Bibliography\Sources.xml

Answer 4

This works fairly well: http://www.snowelm.com/~t/doc/tips/makebib.en.html

Answer 5

I made a vba macro for excel in windows to get several DOIs from plain text citations via crossref.
With the DOIs, you can get all bibtex formatted citations with R.
1. Download excel file with macro
2. Put your plain text citations in column A, modify slightly the numbers in columns F and H to get correctly the title in column K.
3. Press Ctrl A, and wait ca. 5 sec per citation.
(in order to use again, restore formulas with the backup sheet)
4. Locate your .csv file with DOIs saved, or save it again manually from sheet2
5. Use something like this to query your DOIs in R

library(RefManageR)
setwd("/your/folder/") # set the folder where the .csv file is
list.files(getwd()) # be sure your .csv file is there
doi<-read.csv("dois.csv", header=FALSE) # pass the file info to the doi object
# get a new .bib file with formatted references
GetBibEntryWithDOI(unlist(doi), temp.file = ("mycitations.bib"),  delete.file = FALSE) 
# write a .csv
bib<-ReadBib("mycitations.bib")
dfbib<-as.data.frame(bib)
write.csv(dfbib,"table.csv")