Easily converting ris-citations to bibtex with emacs and bibutils

The problem

Nature only gives me ris-formatted citations, but I use bibtex.

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, so when I find a ris reference, the first data I get for the ris-citation is a link.

The solution

Making it possible

bibutils¹ 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, 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 you can use any license used by emacswiki or worg).

(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.