Several months ago I blogged about Converting a plaintext bibliography to RIS format for Endnote. It’s not as painful a process as typing up hundreds/thousands of records, but it’s still painful.

This last week, I had to repeat the process. Eight painful work-hours later, I heard a colleague had something similar to do. And I thought there must be a way to automate it so one doesn’t have to do the endless typing every time.

Then I was home sick and got bored and ended up making a basic APA converter. Then (still sick and still bored) I got all fancy-schmancy and named and documented it and everything.

Thus, Ref2RIS.

Notes:

• If you really can’t get access to MacOS or Linux to do this on and can’t get sed on Windows, email me – I’ll do it for a dollar or a good cause.
• If you need a style other than APA, also email me. Whether/how quickly I get around to it will depend on a complex formula of many factors, but I think it’ll be quicker to make than the first one was, and right at the moment my motivation is high.
• If you use it successfully, please let me know, spread the word, and/or if you’re really enthusiastic there’s a tipjar on the site.