Free online ENW to TXT converter

A library database, editor, script, or archive system may accept a citation file only as .txt. Converting an EndNote export creates a broadly readable copy that can be searched, edited, or shared without reference-management software.

What the ENW format is

In the Text files category, ENW is an EndNote tagged reference file. EndNote, researchers, librarians, and citation workflows use it to exchange bibliographic records between reference managers, library databases, and publishing tools.

An ENW file is already plain text, but its fields use EndNote tags. Typical lines include %0 for the reference type, %A for an author, %T for a title, and %D for a publication year. The format is intended for software that understands these tags rather than for attractive human-readable documents.

What the TXT format is

TXT is an unformatted text format containing characters, line breaks, and optionally tabs or other delimiters. Notepad, TextEdit, code editors, terminal utilities, document systems, and import scripts can open it without EndNote.

TXT is suitable for searching, scripting, basic editing, archiving, and systems that reject specialized extensions. It cannot preserve citation styles, page layout, hyperlinks, attached PDFs, or EndNote library relationships. A direct conversion normally keeps the ENW tags and the bibliographic text rather than turning the records into formatted prose.

How to convert an ENW file to TXT

For a quick conversion without installed software, use the converter on 101convert.com:

1. Open the ENW-to-TXT converter on 101convert.com.
2. Upload the .enw file.
3. Choose TXT as the output format and start the conversion.
4. Download the resulting .txt file.
5. Open it in a plain-text editor and check the tags, characters, and line breaks.

Keep the original ENW file if the records may later need to be imported into EndNote or another citation manager.

Save the file with a text editor

Because ENW is already plain text, changing its filename extension is often enough. Renaming references.enw to references.txt changes the filename, not the contents or character encoding, but it makes the file visible to software that requires a TXT extension.

To create a separately saved copy:

1. Open the ENW file in Notepad, Notepad++, TextEdit in plain-text mode, or another unformatted text editor.
2. Choose File → Save As.
3. Use a filename ending in .txt.
4. Select UTF-8 encoding when the editor provides an encoding option.
5. Disable rich-text or automatic-formatting options, then save the copy.

Use this method when the receiving program requires a newly written TXT file or when you need to change the encoding. Do not use rich-text mode, which can add formatting data that does not belong in a plain-text file.

Export through EndNote

EndNote is useful when you need a readable bibliography or a selected subset of records instead of an unchanged tagged export:

1. Open the ENW file or its references in EndNote.
2. Select the references to export.
3. Choose File → Export.
4. Select a plain-text output type such as Text File (*.txt), if available.
5. Choose an output style if EndNote offers that setting; the style controls the order and presentation of fields.
6. Set the destination filename with a .txt extension and export.

An EndNote export can produce a formatted bibliography instead of the original %-tagged records. Use the direct copy or converter method when another reference manager must re-import the EndNote tags.

Quality and compatibility checks

• Inspect author names, accented characters, non-Latin scripts, punctuation, and line breaks after conversion.
• Prefer UTF-8; older ANSI or Windows-1252 encodings can replace unsupported characters with question marks.
• Expect tags such as %A and %T to remain in a direct TXT copy. Their presence indicates that the bibliographic structure was retained, not that the conversion failed.
• TXT stores text only. It cannot carry PDFs, images, database links, multiple citation styles, or other relationships from an EndNote library.
• Test the resulting file in the program that will receive it, because import tools may require a particular tag set, delimiter, encoding, or line-ending convention.