Easily converting ris-citations to bibtex with emacs and bibutils

The problem

Nature [1] only gives me ris-formatted [2] citations, but I use bibtex [3].

Also ris is far from human readable.

The background

ris can be reformatted to bibtext, but doing that manually disturbs my workflow when getting references while taking note about a paper in emacs.

I tend to search online for references, often just using google scholar [4], so when I find a ris reference, the first data I get for the ris-citation is a link.

The solution

Making it possible

bibutils [5]¹ can convert ris to an intermediate xml format and then convert that to bibtex.

wget -O reference.ris RIS_URL
cat reference.ris | ris2xml | xml2bib >> ref.bib

This solves the problem, but it is not convenient, because I have to switch to the terminal, download the file, convert it and append the result to my bibtex file.

Making it convenient

With the first step, getting the ris-citation is quite inconvenient. I need 3 steps just for getting a citation.

But those steps are always the same, and since I use Emacs [6], I can automate and integrate them very easily. So I created a simple function in emacs, which takes the url of a ris citation, converts it to bibtex and appends the result to my local bibtex file. Now I get a ris citation with a simple call to

M-x ris-citation-to-bib

Then I enter the url and the function appends the citation to my bibtex file.²

Feel free to integrate it into your own emacs setup (additionally to the GPLv3 [7] you can use any license used by emacswiki [8] or worg [9]).

(defun ris-citation-to-bib (&optional ris-url) 
  "get a ris citation as bibtex in one step. Just call M-x
ris-citation-to-bib and enter the ris url. 
Requires bibutils: http://sourceforge.net/p/bibutils/home/Bibutils/ 
"
  (interactive "Mris-url: ")
  (save-excursion
    (let ((bib-file "/home/arne/aufschriebe/ref.bib")
          (bib-buffer (get-buffer "ref.bib"))
          (ris-buffer (url-retrieve-synchronously ris-url)))
      ; firstoff check if we have the bib buffer. If yes, move point to the last line.
      (if (not (member bib-buffer (buffer-list)))
          (setq bib-buffer (find-file-noselect bib-file)))
      (progn 
        (set-buffer bib-buffer)
        (goto-char (point-max)))
      (if ris-buffer
          (set-buffer ris-buffer))
      (shell-command-on-region (point-min) (point-max) "ris2xml | xml2bib" ris-buffer)
      (let ((pmin (- (search-forward "@") 1))
            (pmax (search-forward "}

")))
        (if (member bib-buffer (buffer-list))
            (progn 
              (append-to-buffer bib-buffer pmin pmax)
              (kill-buffer ris-buffer)
              (set-buffer bib-buffer)
              (save-buffer)
          ))))))

Happy Hacking!

PS: When I don’t have the URL (many thanks to journals giving me only a download button), I open the file, select the content and hit M-| (shell-command-on-region) with ris2xml | xml2bib (searching backwards via C-r ris so I to avoid typing the exact command) and get the bibtex version in the results buffer.