RIS as an export format

Last reviewed on April 24, 2026

RIS is a tag-based bibliographic format that long pre-dates the web. A .ris file is a sequence of records, each made up of two-letter tags followed by their values. Almost every reference manager and most major bibliographic databases — PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science — can read and write it. For users who already work in EndNote, Mendeley, or Zotero, importing RIS is usually a single menu click.

Anatomy of a record

TY  - JOUR
AU  - Smith, Jane
AU  - Doe, John
TI  - Something about pdf extraction
JO  - Journal of Document Engineering
PY  - 2023
VL  - 12
IS  - 3
SP  - 101
EP  - 120
DO  - 10.1234/jde.2023.0012
ER  -

Each record begins with TY (the type) and ends with ER. The two characters of each tag are followed by exactly two spaces, a hyphen, a space, and then the value. Authors are repeated with one AU per author. Long values can wrap onto continuation lines.

Common tags

Tag	Meaning
`TY`	Reference type (JOUR, BOOK, CHAP, CONF, RPRT, THES, GEN, …)
`TI` or `T1`	Primary title
`AU`	Author (one per line)
`ED`	Editor
`JO` / `JF` / `T2`	Journal or container title
`PY` / `Y1`	Publication year
`DA`	Date (YYYY/MM/DD)
`VL`	Volume
`IS`	Issue
`SP`	Start page
`EP`	End page
`DO`	DOI
`UR`	URL
`AB` / `N2`	Abstract
`KW`	Keyword (one per line)
`PB`	Publisher
`SN`	ISBN or ISSN
`LA`	Language
`ER`	End of record (mandatory)

Type codes

The TY value tells the importer what kind of work this is. Common ones:

JOUR — journal article.
CONF / CPAPER — conference paper.
BOOK — whole book.
CHAP — book chapter.
RPRT — report.
THES — thesis.
UNPB — unpublished work.
ELEC — electronic resource.
GEN — generic catch-all.

Reference managers often translate these into their own internal type names on import; round-tripping a record through two different managers can change its type slightly.

Compatibility quirks

Different vendors use slightly different tags for the same field (JO, JF, and T2 all appear for journal title in the wild). A safe writer outputs the most widely supported tag for each field; a safe reader accepts all the synonyms.
Some importers require the file to use Windows-style CRLF line endings. Most modern importers no longer mind, but a few legacy ones still do.
Author names should be in Family, Given order, with a comma. If a record uses Given Family instead, the importer may guess wrong about which part is the family name.
The ER line is mandatory. Records without it are silently dropped by some importers.

When to choose RIS

RIS is the smoothest option when the destination is EndNote, Mendeley, Zotero in default settings, or a publisher's submission portal that asks for "RIS or EndNote XML". For LaTeX-based workflows, BibTeX is more idiomatic; for tools built around the Citation Style Language, CSL-JSON keeps more structure intact. Most reference managers can convert between them on import.