ISBN to BibTeX Converter
Free. No signup. Runs in your browser.
Paste an ISBN, get a clean @book entry. Subtitles join the title with a colon, dates are parsed down to the year, OpenLibrary and Google Books are both queried so books missing from one show up from the other, and acronyms in titles stay capitalised – ready to drop into your .bib without breaking the compile.
How to convert ISBNs to a BibTeX file online
thelatexlab.com/isbn-to-bibtex/ for next time.
9780262035613) or ISBN-10 (0262035618), with or without hyphens. Up to 50 – one per line – for batch conversion. If you have an EAN/UPC barcode that isn’t an ISBN, it won’t resolve.
Kr{\"a}mer) for older bibtex setups. Default is BibLaTeX.
@book to @inbook or @incollection per row if you’re citing a chapter. Use the per-row Copy button, or Copy all / Download .bib at the bottom for the full batch.
Where most ISBN converters break
title = "Artificial Intelligence" and subtitle = "A Modern Approach". BibTeX has no subtitle field on @book, so converters that read only title drop “A Modern Approach” silently. The tool joins them with a colon so the full title makes it into the entry.
Title: Subtitle
joined at conversion
publish_date is famously inconsistent: “2023”, “January 2023”, “January 1, 2023”, “2023-01-01”, sometimes just a month-year string. Converters that pass it through verbatim end up with year = {January 1, 2023}, which BibTeX accepts but every bibstyle then renders wrong. The tool extracts the four-digit year and drops the rest.
plain, abbrv, and most bibstyles that case-fold titles, an unprotected title turns “AI: A Modern Approach” into “Ai: a modern approach”. The portable fix is wrapping all-caps tokens in braces. If you’ve ever debugged a “Missing } inserted” error from a manually-pasted title, this is the upstream cause.
{AI}
applied at conversion
edition or volume field by hand after copying. Citekeys are lastnameYearWord with collision handling.Frequently asked questions
Either works. Books published before 2007 typically only have an ISBN-10; books after carry both. The tool accepts both forms with or without hyphens, and (when querying Google Books) prefers the ISBN-13 in the output entry because that’s the modern standard. If your bibstyle is picky about the form, search-and-replace after copying.
“Not found” means all three lookup paths (OpenLibrary’s books API, OpenLibrary’s search index, Google Books) returned nothing. This happens most often for self-published books, university-press titles outside Anglophone catalogues, very recent releases that haven’t propagated yet, and translations whose ISBN was registered in a smaller national agency. Check the ISBN with the publisher’s site to confirm it’s real, and if it is, you’ll need to enter the entry by hand following the @book field conventions.
@book is for citing the whole book – the tool’s default. @inbook is for citing a specific chapter or page range of a single-author book. @incollection is for a chapter in an edited multi-author volume (you’d add editor and booktitle fields). @collection describes the edited volume itself. Use the per-row entry-type override to switch on a per-entry basis, then add the chapter-level fields by hand.
Edition strings (e.g., “4th edition”) and individual volume designators aren’t extracted – OpenLibrary’s data is sparse and Google Books rarely separates them. If you’re citing the 4th edition of a textbook, add edition = {4} after copying. For multi-volume works, OpenLibrary’s guidance is that each volume should have its own ISBN, so paste those individually. For translations, the tool returns whatever metadata the queried database has – if you need both the original and the translator, you’ll need to merge two entries.
Free, no signup. ISBNs go directly from your browser to OpenLibrary and (if needed) Google Books – they never touch our server. The output exists in your browser session and disappears when you close the tab.
Yes. The references-from-Word path is covered in our references-conversion guide, and for the whole-thesis workflow (chapters, references, figures, the university template) see thesis LaTeX formatting. Email help.thelatexlab@gmail.com with the manuscript and target university template for a quote.
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