Citations & Bibliography

How to Get BibTeX Citations from Google Scholar

Google Scholar is the fastest way to find BibTeX entries for academic papers. With a few clicks, you can copy a properly formatted BibTeX entry and paste it into your .bib file. However, Scholar entries sometimes have errors or missing fields that need fixing. Bibby AI integrates citation search directly into the editor, letting you find and insert BibTeX entries without leaving your document — faster than switching between Scholar and Overleaf tabs.

Get a BibTeX Entry from Google Scholar

Search for the paper on Google Scholar and use the cite button to get the BibTeX entry:

% Step 1: Go to https://scholar.google.com
% Step 2: Search for the paper title or author
% Step 3: Under the search result, click the quote icon ("Cite")
% Step 4: In the citation popup, click "BibTeX" at the bottom
% Step 5: Copy the entire BibTeX entry
% Step 6: Paste it into your .bib file

% Example result from Google Scholar:
@inproceedings{vaswani2017attention,
    title     = {Attention is all you need},
    author    = {Vaswani, Ashish and Shazeer, Noam and Parmar, Niki and
                 Uszkoreit, Jakob and Jones, Llion and Gomez, Aidan N and
                 Kaiser, {\L}ukasz and Polosukhin, Illia},
    booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
    volume    = {30},
    year      = {2017}
}

% Then cite it in your document:
\cite{vaswani2017attention}
% Output: [1] or (Vaswani et al., 2017) depending on your style

Fix Common Issues in Google Scholar BibTeX Entries

Google Scholar entries are auto-generated and often have issues. Always review and fix them before using:

% ISSUE 1: Missing or incorrect venue information
% Scholar often shortens or omits conference/journal names
% BAD:
@article{devlin2018bert,
    title   = {Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers},
    author  = {Devlin, Jacob and others},
    journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.04805},
    year    = {2018}
}
% FIXED (after published at NAACL 2019):
@inproceedings{devlin2019bert,
    title     = {{BERT}: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding},
    author    = {Devlin, Jacob and Chang, Ming-Wei and Lee, Kenton and Toutanova, Kristina},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North {A}merican Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics ({NAACL})},
    pages     = {4171--4186},
    year      = {2019},
    doi       = {10.18653/v1/N19-1423}
}

% ISSUE 2: Acronyms not protected with braces
% BAD:  title = {BERT: Pre-training of Deep...}
% GOOD: title = {{BERT}: Pre-training of Deep...}

% ISSUE 3: Wrong entry type
% Scholar often uses @article for conference papers
% Change @article to @inproceedings for conferences

Enable Google Scholar BibTeX Settings

Configure Google Scholar to make BibTeX export easier and show the BibTeX link directly under results:

% Configure Google Scholar for easier BibTeX access:
% Step 1: Go to https://scholar.google.com/scholar_settings
% Step 2: Under "Bibliography manager", select:
%         "Show links to import citations into BibTeX"
% Step 3: Click "Save"
%
% Now every search result will show a direct "Import into BibTeX" link!

% PRO TIP: Use Google Scholar's advanced search for better results:
% - Exact phrase: put title in quotes
%   "Attention is all you need"
% - Specific author:
%   author:vaswani "attention is all you need"
% - Date range: use the sidebar filters

% After getting the BibTeX, add it to your .bib file:
@inproceedings{vaswani2017attention,
    title     = {Attention is All You Need},
    author    = {Vaswani, Ashish and Shazeer, Noam and Parmar, Niki and
                 Uszkoreit, Jakob and Jones, Llion and Gomez, Aidan N and
                 Kaiser, {\L}ukasz and Polosukhin, Illia},
    booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
    volume    = {30},
    pages     = {5998--6008},
    year      = {2017}
}

% Cite in your document:
The Transformer architecture~\citep{vaswani2017attention} revolutionized NLP.

💡 Tips

•Always verify the venue and year — Scholar sometimes shows the arXiv preprint date instead of the published conference date.
•Protect acronyms with braces: {BERT}, {GPT}, {NLP} — otherwise the bibliography style may lowercase them.
•If a paper has both an arXiv version and a published version, cite the published version for credibility.
•Bibby AI's built-in citation search pulls from multiple databases and auto-formats entries, saving you the Scholar copy-paste workflow.

Try This in Bibby AI

Write LaTeX faster with AI auto-complete and instant compilation.

Start Writing Free