Create bibtex from a list of text references

Some prefer to manually cite and reference documents that they work on. I am not one of those people. This method, especially when working collaboratively, often results in repeating the same double-check for references and style formatting over and over and…..

I much prefer to use a reference manager like Zotero which makes it unbelievably easy to get your references into. Most times, you can just drop a PDF in and then find the reference data based on info in the PDF. But, more about Zotero in a later post perhaps. For now, what do you do when you receive a huge list of references in APA/MLA/etc. format and want to add them to your reference manager?

For this task I’ve used a tool from Makino Takaki fairly successfully a few times now to convert a list of text references to BibTeX and then import into Zotero. It’s not foolproof and you’ll have to double-check in the import but it’s a start.

I’m hoping that someone with more time available than myself will take his source code and tweak it to improve this tool.