{"slug": "doi-to-bibtex-converter-doesn-t-lowercase-your-acronyms-or-choke-on-ampersands", "title": "DOI to BibTeX converter - doesn't lowercase your acronyms or choke on ampersands", "summary": "A developer built a client-side DOI-to-BibTeX converter that runs entirely in the browser, sending requests directly to CrossRef's API without any server intermediary. The tool preserves acronyms in titles by wrapping all-caps tokens in braces, escapes reserved LaTeX characters like ampersands, and offers two output dialects: BibLaTeX (raw UTF-8) and Legacy BibTeX (macro-based). Failed lookups display inline reasons, and users can override entry types via a dropdown.", "body_md": "Paste a DOI (up to 50, resolved in parallel), it goes straight from your browser to CrossRef's API, comes back as bibliographic data, gets written to BibTeX. Nothing touches a server in between - exists in the browser session, gone when you close the tab.\n\n**Two output dialects**: BibLaTeX keeps accents as raw UTF-8 (for biber), Legacy BibTeX rewrites them as macros like Kr{\\\"a}mer (for old pdfLaTeX bibtex setups, since raw UTF-8 either errors or sorts wrong there). Check your preamble - \\usepackage{biblatex} + \\addbibresource means BibLaTeX, \\bibliographystyle + \\bibliography means Legacy.\n\n**The actual fixes**: titles aren't brace-protected by most converters, so under bibstyles that case-fold titles, \"DNA repair in RNA viruses\" becomes \"Dna repair in rna viruses\" - this wraps all-caps tokens in braces so that can't happen. CrossRef returns bare reserved characters like & in journal names, which is an active LaTeX character and throws \"Misplaced alignment tab character\" on compile - auto-escaped. CrossRef also mistags entry types more than expected (tags conference papers as journal-article), so there's a per-row dropdown to override @article before you copy.\n\n**Failed lookups show inline with the reason** - usually a typo, a withdrawn paper, or a record not in CrossRef's index. If it's not in CrossRef but you know the PMID or arXiv ID, the PubMed and arXiv tools exist for exactly that fallback. Worth knowing: the BibTeX this produces is a clean starting point, not pre-conformed to IEEE/Elsevier/ACM submission templates - those enforce their own field ordering on top.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/doi-to-bibtex-converter-doesn-t-lowercase-your-acronyms-or-choke-on-ampersands", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/saurabh_shah/doi-to-bibtex-converter-doesnt-lowercase-your-acronyms-or-choke-on-ampersands-51gm", "published_at": "2026-06-20 09:58:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-20 10:06:42.252969+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "large-language-models"], "entities": ["CrossRef", "BibTeX", "BibLaTeX", "PubMed", "arXiv", "LaTeX", "pdfLaTeX", "biber"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/doi-to-bibtex-converter-doesn-t-lowercase-your-acronyms-or-choke-on-ampersands", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/doi-to-bibtex-converter-doesn-t-lowercase-your-acronyms-or-choke-on-ampersands.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/doi-to-bibtex-converter-doesn-t-lowercase-your-acronyms-or-choke-on-ampersands.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/doi-to-bibtex-converter-doesn-t-lowercase-your-acronyms-or-choke-on-ampersands.jsonld"}}