A BibTeX to APA 7 converter turns the raw @article{…} records exported by Zotero, Mendeley or Google Scholar into a polished APA 7th edition reference list — correctly inverted author names, sentence-case titles, italicised journals, and full DOI links. Everything runs in your browser, so your bibliography stays private.
How it works
The tool first parses the BibTeX: it reads each @type{key, field = {value}, …} record, handling braces and quotes around values, and decodes common LaTeX accents (e.g. {\"o} → ö). Then it formats each entry to APA 7 rules:
- Authors are inverted to
Surname, A. B., joined with commas and a final ampersand (up to 20, then…and the last author). - Year follows the authors in parentheses:
(2021). - Title is rendered in sentence case (only the first word, the word after a colon, and brace-protected proper nouns are capitalised).
- Source depends on type: a journal article shows
*Journal*, *volume*(issue), pages.; a book shows the title in italics then the publisher. - DOI is appended as
https://doi.org/….
References are then sorted alphabetically by the first author’s surname.
Example
The BibTeX:
@article{smith2021,
author = {Smith, Jane and Doe, John},
title = {A study of {DNA} repair},
journal= {Nature},
year = {2021}, volume = {12}, number = {3}, pages = {45--58},
doi = {10.1000/xyz}
}becomes:
Smith, J., & Doe, J. (2021). A study of DNA repair. Nature, 12(3), 45–58. https://doi.org/10.1000/xyz
Tips and notes
- Protect proper nouns and acronyms in the BibTeX with braces (
{DNA}) so APA sentence-casing keeps them capitalised. - Use
--for page ranges in BibTeX; the tool converts it to an en dash. - Missing fields are skipped gracefully rather than printing empty brackets.
Common BibTeX export issues and how to fix them
Sentence case problems. Google Scholar and many database exporters produce titles in Title Case (Every Word Capitalised). APA requires sentence case (Only the first word and proper nouns capitalised). The tool applies sentence-casing automatically, but it cannot know which words are proper nouns — protect them in the BibTeX with curly braces: {Berlin}, {COVID-19}, {Python}. If a title still looks wrong after conversion, add braces in the BibTeX source and run it again.
Unicode and accent encoding. LaTeX BibTeX files often encode accented characters as {\"o} (ö), {\'{e}} (é), or {\ae} (æ). The converter decodes the most common LaTeX accent commands automatically. If your exported BibTeX already uses UTF-8 characters directly, those will pass through correctly without any conversion.
Missing DOIs. APA 7 requires a DOI for any article that has one. If your BibTeX has no doi field, the reference will still format correctly, but you should add the DOI manually. For journal articles published after about 2000, a DOI almost certainly exists — find it via doi.org or CrossRef and add doi = {10.xxxx/xxx} to the BibTeX entry before converting.
Author names in wrong order. BibTeX expects Last, First or First Last — most exporters get this right, but occasionally a name comes through with the order inverted or a corporate author is wrapped in extra braces. If an author name looks wrong in the APA output, check the author field in the original BibTeX and fix the formatting there.
APA 7 changes from APA 6
If you used APA 6th edition previously, the main changes to be aware of are:
- Up to 20 authors are now listed in full before the ellipsis, up from six. The tool implements this correctly.
- DOIs are now formatted as full
https://doi.org/URLs, not abbreviated. - The place of publication is no longer required for books — only the publisher.
- “Retrieved from” is no longer used for most web sources; the URL or DOI alone suffices.
The converter follows APA 7 throughout. If you need APA 6 output, the main differences to adjust manually are the author truncation point (six, not twenty) and the DOI formatting.