RIS Citation Export

RIS is a standardized tagged format for bibliographic citations, developed by Research Information Systems to enable the exchange of data. Online library catalogs can export citations in this format, and citation management applications can export and import RIS.

Read about RIS at wikipedia.org/wiki/RIS (file_format) and fileformat.com/misc/ris.

See importing instructions for Zotero: zotero.org and guides.library.illinoisstate.edu;
for Mendeley: mendeley.com and library-guides.ucl.ac.uk;
for Endnote: clarivate.com and libguides.utsa.edu.

The first list below shows how our database field names are mapped to the RIS Tags. The second list shows how our “Collections” are (loosely) mapped to the Type field. See list of RIS tags and types.

Some notes:

• UNPB is generally assigned to unpublished academic-style items only
• WEB is for web-only academic-style items; many items in UNPB could be classified WEB; these have not yet been sorted
• PCOMM is personal letters other than from the Guardian or Institutions
• GEN is everything else




• Our Tags have not yet been tested fully with the Types for different reference managers and there will be inconsistencies. For example, our field C1 “document history” turns into “cast member” in Zotero; our field A1 “author” turns into “director” if the Type is Video and “performer” if the Type is Audio. This can be fixed in a future update, but will require more hands-on familiarity with the reference managers than I have time for now.

RIS links are found at the bottom right of all documents and Collections at this site (e.g. on this page, look below for “Citation: ris/6717“). Though having a “.ris” extension, the files are plain-text and can be opened in a text editor — but once Endnote/Zotero/Mendeley are installed, they should open automatically in that program. Their encoding is UTF-8.

TY  - COLLECTION

ID  - BLO catalog item #
UR  - FILE-NAME
WT  - Baha'i Library Online

T1  - TITLE-PUNCTUATION; TITLE-CURRENT; SUBTITLE; TITLE-TRANSLATED; TITLE-TRANSLITERATED
T2  - TITLE-PARENT, if book
JF  - TITLE-JOURNAL, if series
JA  - TITLE-JOURNAL, journal abbreviation

A1  - AUTHOR-1... (repeats for each author)
A2  - CONTRIBUTOR-1 (ed, comp, trans)... (repeats)
A3  - ED-VOLUME

Y1  - DATE-CURRENT
Y2  - DATE-FIRST
VL  - VOLUME
IS  - VOLUME
SP  - PAGE-RANGE (start)
EP  - PAGE-RANGE (end)
M2  - PAGE-TOTAL
PB  - PUBLISHER-CURRENT; PUBLISHER-FIRST
CY  - CITY-CURRENT; CITY-FIRST

M1  - INVENTORY
M3  - COLLECTIONS 1-3, actual
SN  - ISSN; ISBN-CURRENT; ISBN13-CURRENT; ISBN-FIRST; ISBN13-FIRST
LA  - LANGUAGE-1-CURRENT; LANGUAGE-2-CURRENT; LANGUAGE-3-CURRENT
L3  - CROSS-REFERENCES
DO  - DOI
U1  - AUDIO
U2  - EPUB
U3  - OCLC

AB  - ABSTRACT
N1  - NOTES
C1  - HISTORY
KW  - TAG 1... (repeats)

ER