BibTeX to Citation Converter

Learn more: how one BibTeX entry becomes eight different citations

One record, eight sets of rules

A BibTeX entry is plain data with no formatting opinion attached: author, title, journal, year, pages, doi. The style you pick decides the rest, and this converter runs a separate formatter for each of the eight styles.

To go from BibTeX to APA specifically: paste an entry like @article{smith2020, author = {Smith, Jane}, title = {Studying urban bee populations}, journal = {Journal of Apiology}, year = {2020}, volume = {12}, pages = {45-58}} and pick APA. It comes out as "Smith, J. (2020). Studying urban bee populations. Journal of Apiology, 12, 45-58." The title prints exactly as typed, so write it the way your target style expects (APA wants sentence case; other styles may not).

The sample bibliography behind the "Load sample" button opens with the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need", which has eight authors. APA prints all eight names and puts the year in brackets straight after them. Vancouver cuts the initials down to "Vaswani A, Shazeer N, ..." and moves the year behind the journal, where it runs together with the volume and pages as "2017;30:5998-6008".

IEEE puts a bracketed number in front of the author name rather than replacing the name with it: "[1] A. Vaswani et al., ...". That number is positional, taken from where the entry sits in the list you are looking at, so changing the sort order renumbers everything. Chicago notes and Nature take their superscript in-text markers from the same position.

Where each style stops listing authors

On a paper with a long author list, the most visible difference between styles is the point at which each one gives up and writes "et al." Every style draws that line somewhere different.

MLA switches to "et al." from three authors up. Chicago and Harvard list up to three, then fall back to the first author alone. Vancouver, IEEE and Nature list up to six; past six, Vancouver and Nature keep the first six names while IEEE keeps only the first.

APA is the outlier. It names every author up to twenty, and only past twenty does it shorten, keeping the first nineteen plus the last one with an ellipsis in between. That is why the eight-author sample entry lists all eight names in APA and just one in IEEE.

What the missing-fields warning actually checks

The missing-fields chip and the per-entry "Missing:" line check a fixed required-field list for each entry type. For a journal article that list is author, title, journal and year. Volume is not on it, so an article with no volume number passes without a warning even though most styles expect one.

A book needs title, publisher and year. A conference paper needs author, title, booktitle and year, a thesis needs author, title, school and year, and the web page types (@online, @webpage, @electronic) need only title and url.

An absent field never breaks the output. A missing year prints as "n.d." in APA, Chicago and Harvard, a missing author prints as "Anonymous" in APA and IEEE, and the other styles leave the gap. The "Fix" button on a flagged entry opens inline boxes for exactly the fields it found missing, so you can type them in and watch the citation re-render without editing your .bib file.

Check the author names before you copy

Accented names written the LaTeX way come out wrong. The parser strips braces and commands instead of translating them, so an author entered as M{\"u}ller appears as M\"uller, with the backslash and quote still sitting inside the name.

Single-letter commands do more damage. The command name is matched greedily, so L{\o}vdal collapses to "L" and Stra{\ss}e collapses to "Stra", taking the rest of the word with it. Typing the real character into the .bib file instead avoids the whole problem, because plain Unicode passes through untouched.

Surnames with particles need the comma form. Given "Jan van der Berg" the parser treats the last whitespace-separated word as the surname and returns "Berg, J. V. D." Given "van der Berg, Jan" it returns the correct "van der Berg, J."

What the three toggles do

Include DOI is on by default and Include URL is off. When both are on the DOI wins, and the URL is appended only when the entry has no doi field at all. The sample's Deep Learning book entry has a url and no doi, so nothing appears at the end of it until you switch Include URL on.

Abbreviate journals works from a fixed list of 39 common title words, matched one word at a time. "Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems" becomes "Adv. in Neural Inf. Processing Syst." Words that are not on the list stay as they are, including short ones like "in", so compare the result against the abbreviation your target journal actually asks for.

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Last reviewed: September 17, 2026