Most modern papers have a DOI (a string like 10.1145/3292500.3330701) or an arXiv ID (like 2103.00020). Either one is enough to pull a complete BibTeX entry. Our free BibTeX builder does this - paste the identifier and get an entry back, with nothing stored.
Where the data comes from
For a DOI, the entry is fetched from Crossref, the registry that publishers submit metadata to. For an arXiv ID, it comes from arXiv's own metadata. Because it's pulled from the authoritative source, the title, authors, year, and venue are usually correct out of the box.
How to do it
- Find the DOI (on the paper's first page or the publisher's site) or the arXiv ID (in the URL or PDF header).
- Paste it into the BibTeX builder.
- Copy the generated entry into your
.bibfile.
What to double-check
- Author accents and special characters. Names with diacritics sometimes need a quick review.
- Title capitalization. Wrap words you want to keep capitalized in braces, e.g.
{LaTeX}, so BibTeX doesn't lowercase them. - Entry type. A preprint may come back as
@miscor@article; pick what your bibliography style expects. - The citation key. Rename it to match your own convention (e.g.
author2021keyword).
Then run the result through the validator to be sure it's clean before you compile.