This page displays results of user-entered PubMed (Medline) search queries in BibTeX format. See details below.
This form will only return up to 10 citations, and it may take 10-30 seconds to produce an answer, depending on the speed of our connection to PubMed and the load level of our server. For downloads of up to 100 citations use this form.
PubMed is an online interface to Medline, the largest database of references and abstracts in the biomedical fields. It provides answers to queries based on keywords or other information about scientific papers in most biomedical journals since 1966.
BibTeX is a citations management tool which takes databases of bibliographic references and LaTeX documents, identifies citations in the text, of the form \cite{id} and retrieves the citations from the databases using the id. The bibliographic entries are then formatted and sorted according to the specified bibliographic style and the \cite forms are replaced with references according to the same style (something like [12], or 12 or [Smith2005] or whatever).
PubMed produces output in a wide variety of formats which, however, do not yet include BibTeX despite the popularity of this format.
medbibtex hopes to correct this situation. In a nutshell, if you enter your PubMed entry in the form above it will display the resulting entries in the form of a small BibTeX database which you can save, normally as a text file.
It generates an id for each paper by taking the shortened form of the journal name, volume and first page, like this: LungCancer:37:9 You can, of course, edit this id later.
For some electrocardiology journals, which I use frequently, I made it generate shorter ids, but this only affect about 8 journals.
In very recent entries, when not all the field are yet properly filled in the PubMed results, the algorithm for assigning ids may fail and you have to add them by hand.
We also try to extract the full name of the author (the FAU field in MedLine) when available, as this makes better database entries and BibTeX is able to display just the initials when required.