BibTeX to CSV Converter

Convert LaTeX bibliography (.bib) files to CSV spreadsheet or JSON. Auto-decodes LaTeX accents to Unicode, handles nested braces. For researchers migrating citations to Zotero, Mendeley, or Excel.

1.0.0
Version
Auth
Batch

About BibTeX to CSV Converter

A .bib file lands in your inbox — exported from Zotero, scraped off Google Scholar, or pulled out of an Overleaf project — and the only thing you actually want is to see the references inside Excel. Open it in Notepad and you see {\"o} escapes and brace- and-comma syntax; paste it into Excel and the columns split on the wrong characters; import it into a reference manager and you've taken on a whole second tool just to look at twenty rows.

This converter parses BibTeX grammar directly — nested braces, quoted strings, protective brace pairs and all — and extracts 20 standard fields per entry: cite_key, author, title, year, journal, booktitle, publisher, doi, isbn, url, abstract, keywords and the rest. It decodes around 40 LaTeX accent sequences into proper Unicode along the way, so \'a becomes á, \"o becomes ö, \c{c} becomes ç. The output is a UTF-8 BOM CSV (which Excel opens cleanly without an import wizard) plus a structured JSON copy, with an entry-type breakdown and year range so you can sanity-check the file at a glance.

Use it to migrate libraries from Zotero or Mendeley into Notion or Google Sheets, prepare bibliometric tables for a grant report, debug a malformed entry that breaks an Overleaf build, audit a Google Scholar export for missing DOIs, or just hand a clean spreadsheet to a co-author who has never installed LaTeX. Files up to 10 MB are processed in a stateless serverless function and discarded after the response.

BibTeX to CSV Converter Use Cases

  • Researchers reviewing hundreds of references in Excel during a literature review
  • Migrating reference libraries from Zotero or Mendeley into Notion or Google Sheets
  • Sharing a clean citation list with non-LaTeX co-authors or reviewers
  • Generating bibliometric statistics — entries by year, journal or author for grant reports
  • Auditing a Google Scholar .bib export for missing DOIs or broken accents
  • Feeding bibliography data into pandas, R or Tableau for downstream analysis
  • Debugging an Overleaf project where a malformed .bib entry breaks the build

BibTeX to CSV Converter Features

  • Extracts 20 standard fields per entry — author, title, year, DOI, ISBN, journal, booktitle, publisher and more
  • Decodes ~40 LaTeX accent sequences to Unicode (\'a → á, \"o → ö, \c{c} → ç, \ss → ß, em/en dashes)
  • Outputs CSV with UTF-8 BOM for Excel plus structured JSON in a single conversion
  • Handles nested braces, protected titles ({NLP}) and quoted-string values correctly
  • Reports entry-type breakdown — @article, @book, @inproceedings, @phdthesis counts
  • Reports year range so you can verify the bibliography's date coverage at a glance
  • Files up to 10 MB processed in a stateless function — discarded after response, no signup

How to Use BibTeX to CSV Converter

Upload your .bib file

Drag-and-drop a .bib or .bibtex file onto the upload area (up to 10 MB), or click to browse from your computer.

Click Convert

The parser walks the BibTeX grammar, normalises LaTeX escape sequences and extracts every standard field for each entry — typically under a second for files of a few thousand entries.

Review the parsed preview

Inspect the first 25 entries plus the entry-type breakdown and year range so you can confirm nothing was misread before downloading.

Download the CSV

Click 'CSV for Excel' — the file opens directly in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice with proper UTF-8 encoding so accented characters render cleanly.

Or grab the JSON

Use the structured JSON copy for programmatic workflows in Python (pandas.read_json), R, JavaScript or any other language.

BibTeX to CSV Converter FAQ

No. The file is processed in a stateless serverless function and discarded immediately after the response is sent. Nothing is logged to disk and we don't retain a copy. If you're parsing confidential research bibliographies, the file leaves only as the CSV or JSON download in your own browser.

Up to 10 MB, which typically corresponds to several thousand BibTeX entries — large enough for most theses, journal-level bibliographies and literature surveys. If you have a larger file, split it by chapter or year before uploading.

All standard types: @article, @book, @inproceedings, @incollection, @phdthesis, @mastersthesis, @techreport, @misc and @unpublished. Non-standard custom types (anything matching @[a-z]+) are also parsed. The blocks @comment, @preamble and @string are correctly skipped without breaking the rest of the file.

No. The parser decodes around 40 common LaTeX escape sequences into proper Unicode — á, ö, ç, ñ, ß, æ, œ, å, ø — plus em/en dashes and the usual escaped punctuation (\&, \%, \#). The resulting CSV is fully UTF-8 and characters render correctly in Excel, Google Sheets and any modern text editor.

Zotero: right-click a collection → Export Collection → Format: BibTeX.

Mendeley: select references → File → Export → Format: BibTeX (.bib).

Google Scholar: click 'Cite' under any result → 'BibTeX' link at the bottom. Both web and desktop clients export the same .bib format.

Yes. The CSV is written with a UTF-8 BOM, so Excel auto-detects the encoding on double-click and characters like á, ö, ñ render correctly on first open. No 'Data → From Text' import wizard is needed. Google Sheets and LibreOffice handle the BOM the same way.

Zotero only exports references already in its database. This tool parses any external .bib file — one a collaborator emailed, a Google Scholar batch export, or a .bib pulled from an Overleaf project — without requiring you to import it into Zotero first. It's also faster when you only need a one-off CSV and don't want to add another bookkeeping step.

Upload your .bib bibliography file

Exported from LaTeX, Zotero, Mendeley, Google Scholar • Max 10MB

Requires login • 1 credit

BibTeX to CSV Converter Tutorial

What is BibTeX?

BibTeX is the de facto bibliography format used with LaTeX. Each reference is an @type{key, field = value, ...} record. Every researcher has a .bib file; reference managers like Zotero and Mendeley export to it.

@article{smith2020deep,
  author = {Smith, John and M{\"u}ller, Karl},
  title  = {Deep Learning},
  year   = {2020},
  doi    = {10.1234/dl.2020}
}

Why Convert?

  • Excel/Sheets analysis — sort by year, filter by author, count citations
  • Bulk import elsewhere — reference managers that don't read BibTeX well
  • Share with non-LaTeX users — collaborators who just want a spreadsheet
  • Clean up bibliographies — find duplicates, missing DOIs

What Gets Extracted

20 columns for each entry:

entry_type, cite_key, author, title, year, journal, booktitle, publisher, editor, volume, number, pages, month, doi, isbn, issn, url, note, abstract, keywords
LaTeX Handling
  • Accented characters decoded: {\"o} → ö, {\'e} → é
  • Protective braces stripped: {NLP} → NLP
  • Em/en dashes, \&, \% normalized
  • @comment, @preamble, @string blocks skipped

Tested with

  • Zotero — Right-click collection → Export → BibTeX
  • Mendeley — File → Export → BibTeX
  • Google Scholar — "Cite" on any result → BibTeX link
  • ACM/IEEE/Springer/arXiv — all provide BibTeX citations