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Sahil Kumar
Sahil Kumar

Posted on • Originally published at thelatexlab.com

BibTeX to APA/MLA/Chicago/Harvard/IEEE/AMA/Vancouver - built all 7

APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, and AMA are not novel - citeproc-js and citation.js already have solid templates for all of these and any halfway decent tool renders them fine. The one real gap I found is Vancouver - a lot of free citation converters just don't have it, and it's the standard for a ton of medical/clinical journals.

How it works across all seven: paste a bibtex entry (@article{...} etc), citation.js parses it into CSL-JSON, then the corresponding CSL template (each one lazy-loaded only when you pick that style, so the page doesn't ship 7 templates' worth of JS upfront) renders the final text. The source bibtex stays visible above the output so if you're converting a batch you can match which output came from which entry.

Vancouver specifically: it's a proper numbered-citation format with author initials formatted correctly (LeCun Y, not LeCun, Yann - a detail some tools get wrong because they're not actually using a real Vancouver CSL template, just reformatting APA).

So: if you need APA/MLA/Chicago/Harvard/IEEE/AMA, this works fine but isn't uniquely better than alternatives. If you need Vancouver, this is one of the few free tools that has it at all.

Tool Pages:-

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