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Import and export

Bring an existing bibliography into myrna in bulk, or take your library out to use it elsewhere. Import accepts BibTeX (.bib) and RIS (.ris) files — myrna detects the format and maps the fields for you. Export gives you a BibTeX or RIS file ready for LaTeX or any reference manager. This page covers both flows and how fields are matched.

Import a file

If you already keep a library in another tool, you can bring many references in at once. myrna reads BibTeX and RIS, detects the format automatically and creates one reference per entry.

  1. 1Export your current library to BibTeX or RIS from the source tool.
  2. 2Open the References module and open the Import / Export dialog.
  3. 3Upload the exported file with Choose file, or paste its contents into the text area.
  4. 4Check the preview: it shows how many references were found and warns about entries with syntax errors, which will be skipped without swallowing the rest of the file.
  5. 5Confirm with Import — a reference is created for each entry, with the fields mapped automatically.
The import deduplicates against your library: entries matching an existing reference by DOI — or, without a DOI, by title and year — are skipped and counted, so reimporting your own export doesn't double everything. Entries with no title, no authors and no DOI are also skipped, since there is nothing to identify them by.
Messy real-world files are handled: LaTeX accents like G{\"o}del are decoded to Gödel, institutional authors in {braces} are kept whole instead of being split at "and", and each entry's original citation key is preserved — your \cite{} commands survive a round trip through myrna.

Export the library

When you need your references outside myrna, export them to a standard file that other tools understand.

  1. 1Open the Import / Export dialog in the References module.
  2. 2Under Export library, choose BibTeX or RIS.
  3. 3Save the generated file (references.bib or references.ris).
  4. 4Use it in your LaTeX processor, text editor or citation manager.
BibTeX is the usual choice for LaTeX workflows; RIS is widely accepted by other reference managers such as Zotero, Mendeley and EndNote. Pick the format your target tool expects. The export includes abstracts and keywords, and duplicate citation keys are suffixed so the .bib file stays valid.

How fields are matched

On import, myrna maps each entry to the reference fields: type, title, authors, year, Journal / Book, volume, issue, pages, publisher, DOI, ISBN, URL, abstract and keywords. The entry type is translated too — for example, a BibTeX article becomes a journal article and inproceedings becomes a conference paper.

Author names are normalized to a consistent "Family, Given" form, and page ranges are standardized, so mixed sources end up looking uniform in your library.

Fields and tags myrna does not recognize are ignored rather than causing an error, so an unusual file still imports cleanly — just review the created references and fill in anything that was left blank. In RIS, the SN tag is only stored as ISBN for book-like records, since journals use it for the ISSN.

To build the library in the first place, or to add single works by DOI, PMID, ISBN, URL, web search or by hand — including several identifiers at once, one per line — see "Add references". To merge near-duplicates that slip through, use the Duplicates view (see "Organize the library"). To cite an imported reference while writing, see "Cite in notes".