Text2Bib

Hi folks,

this month is going to be very very busy for me, a lot of writing reviewing and teaching. Today founding 5 free minutes I wanna point out a really useful tool called text2bib. Text2Bib converts a plain text list of references in any style to BibTeX ... well, in almost any style. Minimal requirements:

1) Either references are separated by blank lines or each line is a separate reference or each reference starts with \bibitem{}, \bibitem{}, \item, \bigskip, or \smallskip.

2) Each reference starts (after possibly one of the separator strings mentioned in the previous point) with a list of authors, which is followed by either a year or a title; if the authors are followed by a year, the next string is the title.

The conversion is not perfect, but is very good for many reference styles (see the examples below). Currently only the item types article, book, incollection, techreport, mastersthesis, phdthesis, and unpublished are detected.

Examples of a book, article, inproceedings:

\bibitem{Bertin83}Bertin, J. (1983),
{\em Semiology of Graphics} (trans. W. Berg). Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press.

\bibitem{Bickel75}Bickel, P. J., Hammel, J. W. and O'Connell, J. W.
(1975).
Sex bias in graduate admissions: data from Berkeley. {\em
Science}, {\it 187}, 398-403.

\bibitem{Farebrother87}Farebrother, R. W. (1987),
``Mechanical representations of the ${L}_1$ and ${L}_2$ estimation
problems'', In Y. Dodge (ed.) {\em Statistical data analysis
based on the L1 norm and related methods}, Amsterdam:
North-Holland., 455-464.


These are output as:

@Book{ Bertin:83,
author = {J. Bertin},
year = 1983,
title = {Semiology of Graphics},
publisher = {University of Wisconsin Press},
address = {Madison, WI},
note = {(trans. W. Berg).}
}
@Article{ Bickel:75,
author = {Bickel, P. J. and Hammel, J. W. and O'Connell, J. W.},
year = 1975,
title = {Sex Bias in Graduate Admissions: Data from Berkeley},
journal = {Science},
volume = 187,
pages = {398-403}
}
@InCollection{ Farebrother:87,
author = {R. W. Farebrother},
year = 1987,
title = {Mechanical Representations of the ${L}_1$ and ${L}_2$ Estimation Problems},
booktitle = {Statistical Data Analysis Based on the L1 Norm and Related Methods},
editor = {Y. Dodge},
publisher = {North-Holland},
address = {Amsterdam},
pages = {455-464}


Download it HERE !