Endnote to Bibtex without pain

| tagged with
  • endnote
  • bibtex
  • bibliography

For others set with the unfortunate task of converting an Endnote database to Bibtex: fear not the command line.

After several hours of fiddling around with Endnote’s own conversion facility, Zotero, Cite-U-Like, Referencer, and even writing my own poorly performing utility, I finally stumbled upon the one true solution: bibutils. This wonderful little package made this otherwise quite frustrating task as trivial as one can expect,

$ sudo apt-get install bibutils
$ endx2xml refs.xml > refs-mods.xml
$ xml2bib refs-mods.xml > refs.bib

Beautiful. The UNIX philosophy wins again.