Deborah Fitchett

MacOS 10.8 and above is careful of your security, which is nice but irritating. If you get an error message "Ref2RIS.app" cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified.) click cancel (ignoring the option to move it to the trash) then go to: System Preferences -> Security and Privacy -> General where you'll see a note that "Ref2RIS.app" was blocked from use because it is not from an identified developer. Click on "Open anyway" - you may get prompted to click "Open" again - and you should be good to go.

Once it's running, follow the instructions for MacOS 10.4 - 10.7 below.

1. Prepare your bibliography:

   Make your bibliography into as correct formatting as you can. I've tried to account for particularly common typos, but random line breaks and egregrious mis-styling will break things.

2. Run Ref2RIS.app:

   Either drag and drop your file(s) onto the application, or double-click the application to run and it will ask which file(s) you want converted. It will then ask what style you want to convert from. Conversion of large bibliographies (eg thousands of references) may take a minute or two; you'll get a message when it's done.

3. Import into your bibliographic manager of choice:

   In Endnote, go to File > Import, select your new .ris file(s), and select options:

   Import Filter = Reference Manager (RIS)

   Text Translation = Unicode (UTF-8)

   If the original has italicised species names, superscripts or subscripts, they'll show as html tags in your library. These can be easily made into proper formatting by following the instructions with the Convert HTML Tags sample plug-in (hosted on the Endnote forum).

Done! Now correct all the mistakes - there will be a lot, it can't be helped. (Though if you see systematic mistakes from a correctly formatted bibliography, see Feedback below.) The original citation is stored in the notes field of each reference.

I believe older Macs don't have the textutil function that lets the application run. Try if you like, but if it gives an error you'll need to:

1. Save your bibliography in Rich Text Format (RTF):

   And if you've created it in Word, you'll need to open it in TextEdit and save as a new RTF document. I'm very sorry, but even Word's RTF adds in all sorts of horrendous encoding behind the scenes which my poor simple scripts just can't cope with.

2. Do some necessary pre-processing:

   Place the rtf copy, together with a copy of markup.sed into your home folder (in Finder, go to Go > Home; in TextEdit, it's under "Places" with the house icon).

   In Terminal (found in Applications/Utilities) type in:

   sed -f markup.sed < input.rtf > output.rtf

   In TextEdit, open output.rtf and go to Format > Make Plain Text, then save as input.txt.

3. Convert from your style to RIS format:

   Put a copy of APA6th.sed (or ClinicaChimicaActa.sed, as appropriate) in your home folder.

   In Terminal, type in:

   LANG=C sed -f APA6th.sed < input.txt > output.ris

   (Setting the LANG environment variable to the C locale prevents it from throwing a wobbly at diacritics and smart quotes.)

4. Import into your bibliographic manager of choice:

   As for MacOS 10.4

   Or convert further to Bibtext format by compiling and installing the command-line program bibutils.

Ref2RIS is not available for Windows because Windows doesn't natively have the tools I used to create the program (in order of importance: sed, textutil, and Applescript); and also because I know nothing about programming in Windows. If anyone else can and wants to, you're welcome to make a Windows version of Ref2RIS as per the GPL license.

In the meantime, Windows users may need to either:

• borrow a Mac for a few minutes; or
• find out how to install and use sed, and then adapt the instructions for older Macs above; or
• try one of the other conversion tools/methods out there.