References exporting guide from Mendeley to a CSV file!

If I may quote Therese Fowler “Some rules are nothing but old habits that people are afraid to change”. I recently had to break one of my habits which is using LateX for my writing activities. For the need of a paper, I have been working on, I used Ms-Word for the entire paper and I came across an issue. In fact, as the article was a systematic mapping, and for the need for data analysis, I needed to export my references into a CSV file to be used in Ms Excel.

It was new because I have been used to deal with BibTex databases only. From my online investigations, I did not find any tool that could do the trick in a one-step conversion. Let me take you through the steps I have identified to be the most rigorous and robust way to the conversion. By any chance, if you found yourself reading this article and don’t know what LateX is, read this article I wrote a while back on the subject.

I assume that we all use a reference manager ;) I personally use Mendeley, therefore, the steps might be different if you use another one.

Step 1: Export from Mendeley to BibTex

In Mendeley Desktop

• File — > Export
• Save as type — > BibTex (*.bib)

Step 2: Using JabRef

LaTeX users might be familiar with this tool but if you are not, you can read about it and download it free of charge from their website. Once you have your BibTex file, you have to open it in JabRef

• File — > Open database
• And select the BibTex file

Step 3: JabRef to CSV

• File — > Export
• Choose CSV file type (*.csv)

Step 4: Import your CSV file to Excel

• Open a new Excel document
• Go to data tab and click “From Text”
• Navigate to the CSV file from the opened window and click import
• Choose “Delimited” from the new window and click “next”
• Check the box next to “type of Delimiter” (comma)
• Click Finnish

As you can see from above, it is a bit tedious but I can ensure you that it works perfectly free of errors and it is always better than typing in our data line by line into Ms-Excel. At this point, according to your data extraction methodology, you can easily add/use the information at your will.

If you come across a tool that could do this in one step, it goes without saying that I want you to let me know! If you think this could interest a peer of yours, feel free to share…