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I have someone who wrote an entire book in a Word document. Now I have to edit it. So I decided to go with LaTeX. However, the book has about 400 references, and, you guessed it, there is no .bib file.

So I really don’t want to rebuild the entire bibliography by hand by clicking links and so on. I’m wondering what tool I should use.

I know how to use Pandoc,[^1] but can’t figure out to extract the bibliography out of the Word document.

If pandoc can’t work and you know another tool that can do that, that’s fine too.

[^1]: pandoc-citeproc, or just citeproc, but I’m not sure how to install it.

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  • Did the Word user use bibliography software? If so, they could provide you with a suitable bibliographical database which you could convert. If the citations and bibliography are just done by hand, automating conversion is going to be an uphill battle. I've not done this forever, but you used to be able to search for formatting in Word, so you might be able to put some markers in prior to converting the document which you could then run through awk or sed or something. But it's still going to need a whole lot of manual fiddling that way.
    – cfr
    Commented Nov 2, 2023 at 18:18
  • JabRef have a tool to convert plain text references to bitext format. Googling "text to bib convert" also list some free converters, but references done at hand could have many errors, that can fool to any converter. Therefore searching by DOI, ISBN, keywords, etc. with JabRef or others tools could pick that references easier and with less errors. Anyway you will have to check carefully the result, so it will a tedious task no matter how you get the bib format.
    – Fran
    Commented Nov 3, 2023 at 1:37
  • @cfr unfortunately, they were done by hand…So yes, it’s gonna tedious work.
    – Louis
    Commented Nov 3, 2023 at 10:12
  • @Fran I’m gonna try with the jabref tool. Thanks
    – Louis
    Commented Nov 3, 2023 at 10:12

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