BibTeX to APSA Citation Converter

What is BibTeX?

BibTeX is the reference format used by LaTeX and by reference managers such as Zotero, JabRef, and Mendeley. Each entry starts with an @ sign and a type – @article, @book, @inproceedings – followed by a citation key and a set of field–value pairs for authors, title, journal, year, and pages. BibTeX stores the raw data of a reference rather than a formatted citation, which makes it ideal input for conversion: every field is already labeled, so nothing has to be guessed from punctuation. Paste one or more entries into CiteTools and the parser reads the fields directly. The citation is built from the fields in your entry, as you wrote them, and is marked As written. The output is a finished citation you can paste into a paper written in Word or Google Docs.

How the BibTeX to APSA conversion works

1. Copy a BibTeX entry from your .bib file or reference manager and paste it into the input field.
2. CiteTools parses the entry’s fields and decodes LaTeX markup such as protective braces and accent commands.
3. Copy the formatted citation, or export the result as plain text, RIS, Word, Rich Text, LaTeX, or PDF.

Example input:

@article{watson1953,
  author  = {Watson, James D. and Crick, Francis H. C.},
  title   = {Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids},
  journal = {Nature},
  volume  = {171},
  pages   = {737--738},
  year    = {1953},
  doi     = {10.1038/171737a0}
}

About APSA Style

American Political Science Association - used in political science and international relations.

APSA style, from the APSA Style Manual for Political Science, 2018 edition, is the author-date system of political science. The first author is inverted and the others keep normal order, all with full first names. The year follows the authors, article titles sit in quotation marks, and a DOI follows the pages. The in-text citation is the surname and the year, with a comma before a page.

Frequently asked questions