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RIS vs BibTeX vs CSL-JSON: when to use which
Export formats are plumbing. Pick the right format for your workflow, and you’ll avoid broken imports, duplicated records, and citation style drift.
RIS (EndNote / Zotero / Mendeley imports)
RIS is a common interchange format for reference managers. Use it when your goal is importing a set of references into a tool.
- Good for bulk import and round-tripping between reference managers.
- Watch for missing fields: journals, issue/page, and author parsing can vary.
BibTeX (LaTeX workflows)
BibTeX is ideal for LaTeX and academic writing pipelines. Use it when your paper is built with LaTeX tooling.
- Great for reproducible writing workflows.
- Beware capitalization rules and escaped characters.
CSL-JSON (tooling and integrations)
CSL-JSON is structured and explicit, making it good for programmatic workflows and integrations.
- Useful when you want to keep a machine-readable representation of metadata.
- Good for dedupe and field-level validation (authors, dates, identifiers).
A conservative rule to avoid bad exports
Export only after you’ve verified the record. If a reference is ambiguous or unresolvable, don’t force it into a citation manager— fix the identifier first.
Use Citation Verification for triage, then export via Citation Generator.