Extract text from Citation files (RIS)
To convert RIS Citations to another format, you need EndNote or other Data software.
To convert other file formats to the "Citation Data File" file type, you need software like EndNote or a similar tool.
The .RIS format is a plain-text standardized file used to exchange bibliographic citation data. Developed by Research Information Systems, it allows academic reference managers like EndNote, Zotero, and Mendeley to share metadata like authors, publication years, and journal titles. For more details, see the RIS Wikipedia page.
Despite its universal adoption in academia, the .RIS format has severe limitations. It is essentially raw text structured with rigid, archaic two-letter tags (e.g., TY - JOUR). A single missing space can break the file parsing. It is terrible for direct human reading and cannot be natively imported into standard word processors like Microsoft Word without third-party plugins. Furthermore, it frequently suffers from text encoding conflicts. Older databases export in ANSI, while modern systems expect UTF-8, which leads to corrupted special characters in author names.
To make this data usable, conversion is highly recommended. Convert to BIB (BibTeX) if you are formatting citations in a LaTeX environment. Convert to CSV to analyze large literature review datasets in a spreadsheet. Convert to XML for programmatic parsing and web integration.
Convert.Guru analyzes your RIS file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted ENW, BIB, BIBTEX, CSV, TXT, NBIB, PDF, DOCX, IRS, XLSX, SPV, ZIP and TSX files.
If you want to convert RIS file to BIBTEX, PDF, CSV, APA, TXT, XML, RTF, DOC, DOCX, ODT, PAGES or TEX, you can use EndNote or similar software from the "Bibliographic Citation Data Exchange" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert PDF, DOC, ASC, TODO, NFO, MEMO, README, DOCX, JPG, TXT, NOTE or RTF files to RIS, try EndNote or another comparable tool in the "Bibliographic Citation Data Exchange" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our RIS converter.