DOI to BibTeX Converter
Free. No signup. Runs in your browser.
Clean BibTeX from any DOI. Diacritics escaped, titles brace-protected, ampersands handled, entry types editable – ready to drop into your .bib without breaking the compile.
How to convert DOIs to a BibTeX file online
thelatexlab.com/doi-to-bibtex/ for next time.Krämer) for older bibtex setups. Default is BibLaTeX.Where most DOI converters break
bibtex on pdfLaTeX, that either errors out or sorts under the wrong letter. The portable form is Krämer. Pick the Legacy BibTeX dialect in the widget to get the macro form; the BibLaTeX dialect preserves UTF-8 for biber.plain, abbrv, and most IEEE / ACM bibstyles. The fix is wrapping all-caps acronyms in braces: {DNA}, {RNA}. If you’ve ever debugged a “Missing } inserted” after pasting a title with unbalanced braces, that’s the symptom this step prevents on the way in.{DNA}
applied at conversionand, an active character in LaTeX. You get Misplaced alignment tab character and and a compile failure – the same family of reserved-character errors that’s easy to misdiagnose. Same story for %, $, #, _.\and
auto-escapedjournal-article more often than you’d think, and preprints inherit the cross-listing publisher’s type. Bibstyles read these differently, so the wrong type silently produces the wrong rendered reference.lastnameYearWord with collision handling. CJK / Arabic / Cyrillic names pass through as UTF-8 in both dialects – there’s no LaTeX accent-macro equivalent, so they need a Unicode-aware bibstyle or biber regardless.Frequently asked questions
CrossRef tags conference papers as journal-article more often than you’d think, and preprints inherit whatever type the cross-listing publisher assigned. The tool uses CrossRef’s type field directly and exposes an entry-type override on each result – switch to @inproceedings, @misc, or whatever fits before copying. If you’re seeing it systemically across many entries, the source data is inconsistent and a manual pass on the whole .bib is worth it.
Preserved as UTF-8 in both dialects – there’s no LaTeX accent-macro equivalent for non-Latin scripts. They render correctly under biber with a Unicode-aware biblatex style, or under pdfLaTeX with \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} and a font that supports the script (use XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX for the cleanest path). If your bibstyle isn’t Unicode-aware, those names will appear as missing glyphs in the compiled PDF regardless of the converter.
Check your preamble. If it has \usepackage{biblatex} and \addbibresource{...}, you’re on biblatex – pick BibLaTeX in the widget above. If it has \bibliographystyle{...} and \bibliography{...}, you’re on legacy bibtex – pick Legacy BibTeX so accents come out as escaped macros instead of raw UTF-8. Overleaf defaults vary by template; when in doubt, run a quick test compile.
Three common reasons: a typo in the DOI string, a paper that’s been withdrawn or replaced, or a dataset / preprint that isn’t in CrossRef’s index. Each failure shows up inline with the original line and the reason, so you can fix or drop it without losing the rest of the batch. If the paper exists in PubMed but CrossRef can’t find it, try /pubmed-to-bibtex/ with the PMID; for preprints, /arxiv-to-bibtex/ with the arXiv ID.
Free, no signup. DOIs go directly from your browser to CrossRef’s public API – they never touch our server. The output exists in your browser session and disappears when you close the tab.
The clean BibTeX output is the right starting point, but journal-specific formats (IEEE’s IEEEtran, Elsevier’s elsarticle, ACM’s acmart) require field combinations and ordering this tool doesn’t enforce on its own. See our IEEE, Elsevier, and ACM formatting services for end-to-end submission conformance.
Yes – reference cleanup at that scale is a service we run. The references-conversion guide covers the Word-to-BibTeX path; for whole-thesis cleanup (chapters, references, figures, the university template) see thesis LaTeX formatting. Email a sample of the file to help.thelatexlab@gmail.com with the target bibstyle or journal and we’ll quote it.
You Have a Word or PDF File. We'll Convert it to Submission-Ready LaTeX.
We convert Word documents and PDFs into clean, submission-ready LaTeX for IEEE, Springer, Elsevier, ACM, arXiv, and more. Equations, tables, citations, and journal templates included. Compiled and tested in Overleaf before delivery.
Reviewed by a real LaTeX specialist.