Free online ODT to BIB converter

A bibliography manager or LaTeX project requires a .bib database, but the references are currently stored in an ODT document. This conversion extracts bibliographic records; it does not convert the document’s page layout into a BibTeX file.

What the ODT format is

ODT is the OpenDocument Text format used for editable word-processing documents. LibreOffice Writer, Apache OpenOffice Writer, and other OpenDocument-compatible programs create ODT files; Microsoft Word and web editors can also open or export them. An ODT may contain paragraphs, tables, images, footnotes, citations, and a bibliography, but its text is not automatically a structured reference database.

What the BIB format is

In the Documents category, BIB normally means a BibTeX or BibLaTeX bibliography database. A record uses an entry type, citation key, and fields such as author, title, year, journal, publisher, and doi. LaTeX systems, BibTeX, Biber, JabRef, Zotero, and citation plugins use these records to generate consistently formatted references.

BIB is useful when references must be reused across LaTeX documents, sorted and formatted automatically, searched by metadata, or maintained independently of a word-processing file.

How to actually convert ODT to BIB

When the ODT contains LibreOffice bibliography fields

1. Open the file in LibreOffice Writer.
2. Check whether citations are fields rather than ordinary typed text by selecting a citation and inspecting Tools → Bibliography Database or Insert → Table of Contents and Index → Bibliography Entry.
3. Open the bibliography database associated with the document and export or copy the records to a tabular format such as CSV, if available.
4. Open the exported data in JabRef using its import function, map columns to BibTeX fields, then choose File → Save As and save as .bib.
5. Review every generated entry, especially author names, dates, titles, accented characters, and citation keys.

When the ODT contains ordinary reference text

There is no dependable one-click conversion because the document does not identify where each record begins or which words represent each BibTeX field. Copy the reference list into a bibliography manager such as Zotero or JabRef, create or correct each record, then export it as BibTeX. DOI, ISBN, or database lookups can supply missing metadata, but each result requires verification.

You can also upload the file to the free converter on 101convert.com without installing software. For an ODT containing prose or unstructured references, treat the result as a starting point and validate the records manually.

When the source is a structured document

If the references originated in Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, JabRef, or another citation manager, export the original library directly as BibTeX instead of converting the ODT. This preserves identifiers and metadata that may have been lost when citations were inserted into the document.

Quality and compatibility limitations

ODT citation fields may contain only a short database identifier, while the full author, title, and publication data remain in an external bibliography database. A converter that sees only the ODT package cannot reconstruct fields that are absent from content.xml.

Plain reference paragraphs can lose author boundaries, corporate authors, page ranges, volume and issue numbers, DOI values, and entry types during parsing. Check generated syntax with BibTeX or Biber and escape special characters such as &, %, #, _, and braces where required. BibTeX and BibLaTeX use different field conventions, so select the target expected by the LaTeX project before exporting.