ISBN to RIS Converter

Paste an ISBN-10 or ISBN-13 and get an RIS book record with author, title, publisher, and year. Free ISBN to RIS converter for Zotero and EndNote.

Paste an ISBN to get an RIS record

Why convert an ISBN to RIS

Typing a book into a reference manager field by field is slow, and the ISBN on the back cover already identifies the edition. Paste it and CiteTools looks the book up in Google Books and then Open Library, and writes a BOOK record: AU for each author, TI for the title, PB for the publisher, CY for the place when the catalogue gives one, ET for the edition, and SN for the ISBN. Both ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 work, with or without hyphens.

How the ISBN to RIS conversion works

Find the ISBN above the barcode or on the copyright page of the copy you used.
Paste it into the converter. CiteTools retrieves the catalogue record for that edition.
Copy the record or download the .ris file, then check the publisher and the edition against your copy before you import it.

Sample RIS record

Every record opens with TY, the type of the work, and closes with ER. Between them each line holds one two-character tag and one value: AU for each author, TI for the title, T2 for the journal or the book a chapter sits in, PY for the year, SP and EP for the first and last page, and DO for the DOI. A reference manager reads these tags on import, so the record needs no editing first. A record built from a registry can carry more lines than the sample, such as SN for the ISSN and LA for the language.

TY  - BOOK
AU  - Kahneman, Daniel
CY  - New York
DA  - 2011///
PY  - 2011
PB  - Farrar, Straus and Giroux
SN  - 9780374275631
TI  - Thinking, Fast and Slow
ER  -

Frequently asked questions

Which edition does the record describe?

The edition the ISBN belongs to. Hardback, paperback, and e-book each have their own ISBN, so paste the number printed in the copy you read.

The lookup found nothing. What now?

Some regional and self-published books are missing from Google Books and Open Library. Paste the full reference as plain text instead, with author, title, publisher, and year, and CiteTools writes the record from what you give.

Can the record describe one chapter?

An ISBN identifies the whole book, so the record type is BOOK. For a chapter, convert the chapter’s own DOI if it has one. The result is a CHAP record with the chapter title in TI.