BibTeX to APA Converter

Each entry is also checked against Crossref and OpenAlex, so a wrong year or a missing DOI is fixed from the published record, and LaTeX accents and braces ({\"o}, {AlphaFold}) come out as plain text.

How each reference is checked

Most reference checkers either only look at punctuation, or send your list to an AI that can itself make things up. This one looks every reference up in the published record, and only calls it found when a record agrees on both the title and the authors. The databases, all free and public, are asked in this order, cheapest and most exact first:

When a record matches, the year, DOI, journal, volume and pages are compared with what you wrote. A different year is only called wrong when the journal, volume or pages confirm it is the same publication, and for books it is never called wrong, because editions and reprints carry their own years. Matched papers are checked for retractions with the Retraction Watch database (part of Crossref since 2023).

What the results mean

• Verified: a published record agrees with the reference on title, authors and year. Nothing to change.
• Found, with fixes: the work exists, but something in your reference is wrong (year, DOI, first author, journal, volume or pages). The correct value is shown next to yours, and the finished list uses it.
• Retracted: the work exists but has been retracted, withdrawn or given an expression of concern. Do not rely on it.
• Does not match: the title exists under other authors, or the DOI belongs to a different work. This is how AI-made references often look.
• Check this one: a close record was found but something important differs. Open it and say yes or no.
• Not found: no database has it. It may be invented, or a source they do not cover (an unpublished thesis, a report, a web page, a paper from the last few days). Search Google Scholar with one click before you keep it.

What it cannot do

No free database holds every source, so the tool never calls a reference fake: it says not found and tells you where to look. It cannot see whether a paper says what you cite it for; it proves the paper exists and is cited correctly, so read the part you rely on. Web pages, laws, standards and most reports are not in paper databases, so those are labelled rather than checked. Titles are put in sentence case for APA, Vancouver and IEEE; a program cannot always tell a name from an ordinary word, so check capitals in names of places, methods and software. Your own titles keep your capitals unless you ask otherwise.

How we tested it

Before release it was run against 56 references in APA, Harvard, Vancouver, IEEE, Chicago and MLA, from biology, medicine, psychology, economics, computer science and sociology: 40 real journal articles, conference papers, books, chapters and preprints; two well-known retracted papers; four real papers with one deliberate error each (a year, two DOIs, an author list); and ten references invented the way AI chatbots invent them. 38 of the 40 real works were found and verified. The other two: a WHO report, labelled as a report because paper databases do not list reports, and the 2014 conference paper that introduced GANs, which no free database lists under its published title (it came back “not found”, or “check this one” when OpenAlex was available, which is why not found never means fake). Both retractions were flagged, all four deliberate errors were caught, and none of the ten invented references was accepted. The formatting of every style was compared with the official CSL style files run by citeproc-js, the engine inside Zotero and Mendeley: 189 style and record pairs come out identical, and the rest differ only where we follow the style guide on purpose.

More free reference tools

The same engine, set up for a different job: Reference checker, Citation checker, AI citation checker, DOI to citation generator, DOI to BibTeX converter, APA to Vancouver converter, BibTeX to RIS converter and RIS to BibTeX converter. Writing a thesis? The dissertation word count breakdown splits your word limit by chapter, and the PhD Gantt chart maker plans the time.