Reference list to BibTeX, checked

Copying references one by one from Google Scholar is slow, and the entries are often incomplete or wrong. CatchTeX turns a whole reference list into BibTeX and checks each entry against scholarly databases before it goes into your .bib file.

Updated 2026-10-05

The quick way

1. Open the paper in CatchTeX (Ctrl+O) and drag a box over the reference list, or the entries you need. A screenshot (Ctrl+Alt+T) works too.
2. Pick the BibTeX chip (Auto also recognises reference lists).
3. CatchTeX splits the list into entries, parses authors, title, venue and year, and looks each one up online. Matched entries are completed with DOI and the official details.
4. Use the arrow next to Copy LaTeX to add the entries to your .bib file, copy the \cite{…} keys, or export RIS for Zotero, Mendeley or EndNote.

@inproceedings{vaswani2017attention,
  author    = {Vaswani, Ashish and Shazeer, Noam and Parmar, Niki and others},
  title     = {Attention Is All You Need},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  volume    = {30},
  year      = {2017}
}

The check

Each entry is looked up in public scholarly databases (Crossref, dblp, arXiv, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar), and you see which entries were confirmed. That catches the usual problems: wrong year, missing co-authors, a preprint cited instead of the published version, or a reference that does not exist. The lookup sends only the reference text, never your document. Apart from the optional AI assistant, it is the only part of CatchTeX that uses the internet.

You can also check an existing .bib or .tex file: CatchTeX looks up every entry and lists the ones that do not match a real publication.

Other ways, compared

Tips

• Set your e-mail address in Settings: the databases ask for a contact address and answer more reliably with one.
• Review entries that found no match by hand before you cite them.