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RIS converter

A .ris file is a citation list in a strict tagged format: every line begins with a two-character tag, then exactly two spaces, a hyphen and a space, then the value. A record starts with TY and ends with ER, and that rigidity is why it interoperates so reliably.

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Where RIS comes from

Research Information Systems created the format for its Reference Manager software in the late 1980s. It outlived the company: PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore and virtually every publisher offer RIS export, and every reference manager imports it. Where BibTeX is the academic-writing format, RIS is the database-export format — which is why most literature reviews begin with a pile of .ris files.

How RIS works

  • The tag column is fixed width: two characters, two spaces, a hyphen, a space. A single space instead of two is the most common export bug, and strict readers reject it.
  • TY opens a record and declares its type (JOUR, BOOK, CHAP, CONF); ER closes it and takes no value.
  • Repeated tags express lists — AU appears once per author, in order.
  • Line endings are conventionally CRLF, reflecting the format's DOS origins.
  • There is no escaping mechanism, so a value cannot contain a line break.

When to use RIS

  • Importing search results from PubMed, Scopus or Web of Science into a reference manager
  • Moving a library between Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote and RefWorks
  • Converting publisher exports to BibTeX for a LaTeX paper
  • Turning a citation export into CSV for screening in a systematic review

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • Rigid enough that implementations genuinely agree
  • Supported by essentially every academic database and reference manager
  • Trivially parseable line by line

Limitations

  • Tag vocabulary varies by vendor, so some fields are lost in transit
  • No nesting, no escaping, and no way to represent structured names
  • The exact-spacing requirement trips up hand-edited files

Compatibility

Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, RefWorks, Papers and every major academic database read RIS. Novus Convert converts it locally to BibTeX, JSON and CSV through the same bounded citation model, so a RIS to BibTeX round trip preserves the core bibliographic fields.

Core bibliographic tags are preserved; vendor-specific tags outside the shared model are dropped and the page says so.

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