Use the free BibTeX to JSON Converter below: your data never leaves your browser — all work happens on your device, and nothing is uploaded to any server.
From Bibliography Files to Usable Data
BibTeX has organised academic references for decades. A .bib file is a compact, human-readable list of papers, books, and reports, each with a type, a citation key, and fields like author, title, journal, and year. It works beautifully inside LaTeX. Outside LaTeX, though, it is awkward: scripts, databases, and web tools want JSON, not BibTeX syntax. This converter translates between the two, turning each entry into a JSON object with the same fields, ready for any tool that speaks JSON.
The translation is faithful. The entry type becomes a type field, the citation key becomes a key field, and every named field becomes a JSON property with the same name in lower case. Author lists stay as text, exactly as written, because splitting author names is a job for a dedicated parser, not a format converter. Braced values lose their outer braces, quoted values lose their quotes, and extra whitespace collapses, so the JSON is clean without losing information.
How to Use It
Paste your BibTeX entries into the box. You can paste one entry or a whole file: the tool finds every entry that starts with an at-sign, a type, and a key, and converts them all into one JSON array. Click convert, and the array appears below, pretty-printed with two-space indentation so it is easy to read and to diff. Copy it into your script or download it as a .json file. If nothing converts, check that each entry starts with the standard shape, like @article{smith2020, with the key followed by a comma.
Field parsing is brace-aware, which is the detail that makes this tool trustworthy. BibTeX values can contain nested braces, like a title with a protected capital letter, and they can contain commas inside those braces. A naive splitter on commas would shred such values. This parser tracks brace depth and only splits fields at commas at the top level, so nested braces and commas inside quoted values survive intact. That is the difference between a converter you can trust and one that quietly corrupts titles.
What the JSON Is Good For
Once references are JSON, ordinary tools open up. You can load the array into a script and filter by year, sort by author, or count entries per journal. You can import it into a database or a spreadsheet by converting JSON to CSV. You can feed it to a web app that renders a reading list, or to a search tool that indexes titles. You can also compare two bibliography files by converting both and diffing the JSON, which is far easier than diffing BibTeX source with its flexible formatting.
The JSON also makes clean-up easier. Duplicate keys stand out when entries are objects in an array. Missing years are visible as absent properties. Inconsistent journal names, like a journal written two ways, show up when you group by the journal field. None of this requires a reference manager: a text editor and a JSON-aware script are enough, and the converter is the step that gets your data into that shape.
Limits and Honest Edges
This converter handles the standard entry shapes: braced values, quoted values, and plain values like numbers. It does not expand BibTeX string abbreviations, so a journal written as a predefined string stays as that string rather than its full text. It does not resolve cross-references between entries, so an entry that inherits fields from another entry keeps only its own fields. And it does not parse author names into given and family parts, because author formats vary too much for a safe automatic split.
Month fields deserve a note. BibTeX months are often written as three-letter abbreviations without braces, and the tool keeps them as text, which is correct. If you need months as numbers for sorting, map them in your own script after conversion. Similarly, page ranges stay as text like “101–118”, with the double hyphen BibTeX uses, rather than being normalised. The converter preserves your data; normalisation is your script’s job, where you can see and control it.
Privacy and Practical Tips
Everything runs in your browser. Your bibliography is never uploaded, which matters for unpublished manuscripts, theses in progress, and reading lists you have not shared yet. Paste, convert, copy, close. A practical tip: convert a copy of your .bib file, not the original, and keep the original as the source of truth. JSON is a working format, not an archive format, and your .bib file remains the version your LaTeX documents cite. Another: after converting, validate the JSON in your editor before feeding it to a script, so a malformed entry fails loudly at the start, not halfway through a job.