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DOI to BibTeX converter

Paste one or more DOIs and get a BibTeX entry for each, ready to copy into your .bib file or download as one. The details come from the paper's own record, not from a guess.

Free, up to 10 DOIs at a time and 30 a day. No account needed.

How it works

  1. Paste your DOIs

    One per line, up to 10 at a time. A bare DOI, a doi: prefix or a full doi.org link all work, and duplicates are looked up once.

  2. We look each one up

    Each DOI is looked up in OpenAlex, an open catalogue of scholarly works, and then at doi.org when OpenAlex has no record. That covers DOIs registered with Crossref and DataCite.

  3. Copy or download

    Every DOI that resolves gets one BibTeX entry with a readable key. Copy them all at once or download them as a .bib file.

A worked example

Paste the DOI of the 2015 Nature review of deep learning and you get an entry like this one:

10.1038/nature14539
@article{lecun2015deep,
  author = {LeCun, Yann and Bengio, Yoshua and Hinton, Geoffrey},
  title = {{Deep learning}},
  journal = {Nature},
  year = {2015},
  volume = {521},
  number = {7553},
  pages = {436--444},
  doi = {10.1038/nature14539},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539}
}

The key is the first author's surname, the year and the first word of the title that is not a small word like the or and. When two of your DOIs would get the same key, they get a and b at the end so your citations never collide. The title sits in double braces so BibTeX keeps its capitals.

What each result means

Found
The DOI resolved and the entry is built from its record. Check it once, as you would any reference, before you hand in.
No record found
Neither OpenAlex nor doi.org knows this DOI. It may have a typo, or it may be very new. Copy it again from the paper's own page.
This DOI is registered with an agency we cannot read yet
The DOI exists, but it belongs to a registration agency other than Crossref or DataCite, so we cannot read its record yet. Many Japanese, Korean and Italian DOIs are like this. Add that entry by hand.
Not a DOI
The line does not look like a DOI. A DOI starts with 10., then a number, a slash and the rest.
Daily limit reached
The daily limit for the free tools has been reached. It resets at midnight UTC.
Could not look this up right now
A lookup service did not answer in time. Nothing is wrong with your DOI: try again in a minute.

What a DOI is, and where to find one

A DOI, or Digital Object Identifier, is a permanent ID for a paper, a book chapter or a dataset. It never changes, even when a journal moves its website, which is why reference styles ask for it.

You will usually find the DOI on the first page of the paper, in the article's web page near the title, or in the reference list of another paper. It always starts with 10. followed by a number, a slash and a suffix, for example 10.1038/nature14539.

What BibTeX is

BibTeX is the reference format LaTeX documents use. Each source is one entry with a type, such as article or book, a key you cite it by, and fields such as author, title, journal and year. Your editor turns those entries into a reference list in the style your document asks for.

Most reference managers can import and export BibTeX too, so a .bib file is also an easy way to move a list of sources from one tool to another.

Using the .bib file

Save the download next to your document, or paste the entries into the .bib file you already have. Then cite a source by its key, for example \cite{lecun2015deep}, and build the document as usual.

In Overleaf, upload the file to your project, or open your existing .bib file there and paste the entries at the end.

Reference managers that read BibTeX can import the same file, which adds every source to your library in one step.

Check before you hand in

An entry is only as good as the record behind it. Records are usually right, but a title can carry odd capitals, a conference paper can be listed as a journal article, and very new papers sometimes lack a page range.

Read each entry once against the paper itself, and check that the style your department asks for is the one your document uses.

Questions

Is this DOI to BibTeX converter free?

Yes. You can look up 10 DOIs at a time and 30 a day without an account. The limit resets at midnight UTC.

Where do the entries come from?

From OpenAlex, an open catalogue of scholarly works, and from doi.org, which hands the request on to Crossref or DataCite depending on who registered the DOI.

Do you keep the DOIs I paste?

No. The DOIs are sent to OpenAlex and doi.org to look them up, and are not saved or linked to you. We count how many lookups each visitor makes in a day, using a key that cannot be turned back into an address and that changes whenever our service restarts.

Why does a DOI say it is registered with an agency you cannot read yet?

Most DOIs are registered with Crossref or DataCite, and we can read those. Some registration agencies, common for Japanese, Korean and Italian publications, publish records we cannot read yet. Add those entries by hand.

Can I convert more than 10 DOIs?

Paste them in batches of up to 10. You can look up 30 a day.

Which entry types do I get?

Journal articles become @article, books @book, book chapters @incollection, conference papers @inproceedings and reports @techreport. Anything else, such as a dataset, becomes @misc.

I need a formatted citation, not BibTeX.

Use the DOI to citation tool, which formats the same DOIs in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE and four more styles. For Zotero, EndNote or Mendeley, the DOI to RIS converter gives you a .ris file.

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