Export formats
The extractor can hand its output to you in several shapes. Which one to choose depends on what the data is going to do next: feed a LaTeX bibliography, import into a reference manager, get pasted into a notebook, or form the body of a short report. The pages below describe each format in enough detail to choose intelligently.
Bibliographic formats
- BibTeX (.bib) — the long-standing reference format for LaTeX workflows.
- RIS (.ris) — the tag-based format favoured by EndNote, Mendeley, and many database exports.
- CSL-JSON — the interchange format used by Citation Style Language processors and many modern tools.
Document formats
- Markdown (.md) — a lightweight markup format readable as-is and converted easily into HTML or PDF.
- Microsoft Word (.docx) — a styled document for users who prefer Word-based editing.
Choosing between them
If you are writing in LaTeX, BibTeX or CSL-JSON with a biblatex backend is the path of least resistance. If you live in Word and Endnote/Zotero, RIS will import more cleanly than BibTeX. If you are building a tool that consumes the data programmatically, CSL-JSON is the most structured and best-documented option. Markdown and DOCX exist for the case where the PDF's content matters more than its citation record — for example, when you want a readable copy of the body text to annotate elsewhere.