EndNote to BibTeX Converter
Free. No signup. Runs in your browser.
Upload or paste EndNote (.enw) and Convert to BibTeX. Multi-line authors stay separate, editors and translators come through, type codes map to the right entry type (@article, @inproceedings, @incollection, @phdthesis, @techreport), and citekeys are generated as lastnameYearWord – ready to drop into your .bib without breaking the compile.
How to convert EndNote to BibTeX file online
thelatexlab.com/endnote-to-bibtex/ for next time..enw file
From EndNote: File → Export → Output Style: EndNote Export (the tagged format, not the styled bibliography). Drop the .enw file using the upload button, or paste the text directly. The parser handles single entries and large multi-entry exports separated by blank lines.Kr{\"a}mer) for older bibtex setups. Default is BibLaTeX..enw content never leaves the tab. Entries that fail to parse show up inline with the reason so you can fix or drop them without losing the rest of the batch.Where most EndNote to BibTeX converters break
%A line per author – that’s how the format works. Naive parsers either take only the first line or join them all into a single comma-separated string, which BibTeX then renders as one author with a very long name. The tool keeps each %A as a separate author and writes them with BibTeX’s and separator. Editors (%E) and translators (%Y) are handled the same way..enw has no concept of a BibTeX citation key – the format predates it. Converters that don’t generate one assign sequential numbers (@article{ref_1, ...}) or random IDs, so after conversion you still have to rewrite every \cite{...} by hand. The tool generates lastnameYearWord keys (e.g. lecun2015deep) directly from the bibliographic data, with collision handling.lastnameYearWord
generated from metadata& (Cell & Molecular Biology), %, #, _, or $. These are active characters in LaTeX. A bare & in a journal field produces Misplaced alignment tab character & and a compile failure (the kind of reserved-character error that’s easy to misdiagnose). The tool escapes all ten reserved characters automatically and brace-protects acronyms ({DNA}, {HIV}, {COVID-19}) at the same time.\& + {DNA}
auto-escaped + brace-protected@misc
EndNote has roughly 50 reference types. Most converters recognise Journal Article and Book and drop everything else into @misc, which loses the structural cue. The tool maps the common set – Conference Paper / Proceedings (@inproceedings), Book Section (@incollection), Thesis (@phdthesis), Report (@techreport), Manuscript (@unpublished), Web Page / Dataset (@misc) – and keeps the per-row override available if a particular entry needs to flip.%R) and URL (%U) are preserved across the round-trip so you can re-resolve downstream. Accented author names are escaped to LaTeX macros under Legacy BibTeX (Kr{\"a}mer) and passed through as UTF-8 under BibLaTeX. CJK / Arabic / Cyrillic names stay UTF-8 in both dialects – there’s no accent-macro equivalent for non-Latin scripts.Frequently asked questions
.enw is the EndNote tagged-export format – a plain text file with %A, %T, %J style tags, one record per blank-line-separated block. That’s what this tool reads. .enl is the EndNote library binary database, which only EndNote itself opens. To convert an .enl, open it in EndNote, select the references, and export as EndNote Export output style to get a .enw.
Yes – the tagged-export format has been stable across EndNote versions for two decades. EndNote Web’s export produces the same tag layout, as does EndNote Click (the browser-extension capture). Vendor-specific extensions to the format (extra % tags) are dropped rather than causing the entry to fail.
EndNote can export in several formats. The EndNote Export output style produces the .enw tagged format this page handles. The RefMan (RIS) Export output style produces RIS instead – that’s what some EndNote configurations default to. If your file starts with TY - use /ris-to-bibtex/. If it’s a PubMed MEDLINE export (4-character tags like PMID, TI, FAU), use /nbib-to-bibtex/.
Three common culprits: (1) the file has a UTF-8 BOM or non-EndNote preamble at the top – the BOM is stripped automatically but other preambles will confuse the parser, so delete anything before the first % tag line; (2) entries aren’t separated by blank lines, so the parser treats the whole file as one entry; (3) the file is actually RIS or NBIB (see previous question). Each failing entry shows up inline with the reason so you can fix the source.
Free, no signup. Parsing runs entirely in your browser – the .enw file or pasted text never touches our server, no network call is made. The output exists in your browser session and disappears when you close the tab.
Yes, reference cleanup is a service we run. If the references live inside a Word manuscript, the references-conversion guide covers the Word-to-BibTeX path, and our thesis LaTeX formatting service handles the full thesis. For a standalone .bib cleanup, email a sample to [email protected] with the target bibstyle and we’ll quote it.
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