Free tools · Citations & References

BibTeX to APA

Paste BibTeX entries, or a DOI, and get APA 7th edition references, alphabetised, with italics in place, ready to paste into a document.

How to use it

  1. Paste one or more BibTeX entries, or a DOI, arXiv id or ISBN.
  2. Press Convert. The references appear in APA order (alphabetical by first author).
  3. Copy the list with formatting into Word or Google Docs, or copy it as plain text.

Why you'd use it

Not every venue takes LaTeX. A grant application, a thesis in Word, a journal that wants APA: the references you already have in a .bib file have to become formatted text, and doing it by hand is where the mistakes go in.

The converter follows the APA 7 rules for the cases that matter: up to 20 authors listed, an ampersand before the last, italics on journal names and volumes, the DOI as a link, and arXiv preprints cited as preprints.

FAQ

Which edition of APA?

APA 7th edition (2020). Author lists of up to 20 names are written in full; longer lists show the first 19, an ellipsis, and the last author.

Does it convert in-text citations?

No. It produces the reference list. In-text citations follow from the entries: (Vaswani et al., 2017) for three or more authors, (Smith & Doe, 2021) for two.

Are titles converted to sentence case?

No. APA wants sentence case for article titles, but a converter cannot tell a proper noun from a capitalised word, so titles are kept as written. Check them before submitting.

Can I paste a DOI instead of BibTeX?

Yes. A DOI, arXiv id or ISBN is resolved first and then formatted, so you can build a reference list without touching BibTeX at all.