Free online RIS to TXT converter

Source format: RIS

RIS is a plain-text citation and bibliography exchange format used by reference managers and academic databases. It stores structured metadata such as authors, titles, journal names, publication dates, volume, issue, pages, and identifiers. RIS is commonly used by researchers, librarians, students, and publishing platforms to move references between tools like EndNote, Zotero, Mendeley, RefWorks, and many library catalog systems.

Typical use cases include exporting search results from databases, sharing reading lists, importing citations into reference managers, and archiving bibliographic records in a portable text form.

Target format: TXT

TXT is a plain text format that contains unformatted text only. It is one of the most compatible file types because it can be opened by nearly any operating system, editor, or scripting tool. TXT is useful when you want a simple human-readable copy of the RIS contents, want to inspect the raw citation data, or need a text file for further processing, searching, or scripting.

The main advantage of TXT is its universal compatibility. However, it does not preserve RIS structure in a specialized way; it simply stores the text content as-is.

How to perform the conversion

Because RIS is already a text-based format, converting it to TXT is usually straightforward. In many cases, you only need to rename the file extension if your goal is to view or store the raw contents as a text file. For a cleaner workflow, open the RIS file in a text editor and save it as TXT.

1. Open the .ris file in a plain text editor such as Notepad, TextEdit in plain-text mode, VS Code, or Notepad++.
2. Check that the file contains readable RIS tags such as TY -, AU -, and TI -.
3. Choose File → Save As.
4. Set the filename to end with .txt, for example references.txt.
5. Save the file using UTF-8 encoding if the editor offers that option, so accented characters and non-Latin text are preserved correctly.

If you prefer command-line conversion, you can simply copy the file to a new name with a .txt extension, for example copy references.ris references.txt on Windows or cp references.ris references.txt on macOS and Linux. This does not change the content; it only changes the filename extension.

You can also convert the file on 101convert.com for free, without installing any software.

Notes on quality and limitations

RIS to TXT is not a format-changing conversion in the usual sense, because both formats are plain text. The result will not become a formatted bibliography or a spreadsheet; it will remain raw text. If the RIS file contains multiple records, all records will appear in the TXT output exactly as text lines.

Be careful not to confuse renaming with reformatting. Renaming .ris to .txt makes the file easier to open in text editors, but it does not alter the underlying data. If your goal is to extract citations into a readable list or another structured format, a reference manager or a dedicated parser may be more appropriate.

Compatibility is generally excellent because TXT is supported everywhere, but the appearance of the file depends on the editor and the chosen character encoding. For best results, use UTF-8 and a plain text editor that does not add formatting.