bib2tex: Converting bibtex to bibitems

A friend asked me today to help him convert a bibtex-file to a bibliography (\bibitem{}), since the journal he submits his paper to doesn’t accept bibtex-files (*.bib). So what we were trying to do is to convert a set of bibtex-references of the following form (from cell):

@article{bartel2009,
	Author = {Bartel, David P. },
	Date = {2009/01/23},
	Journal = {Cell},
	Month = {01},
	Number = {2},
	Pages = {215--233},
	Title = {Micro{RNA}s: Target Recognition and Regulatory Functions},
	Volume = {136},
	Year = {2009}}

to a format that understands, e.g.:

\bibitem[Bartel(2009)]{bartel2009}
David~P. Bartel.
\newblock Micro{RNA}s: Target recognition and regulatory functions.
\newblock \emph{Cell}, 136\penalty0 (2):\penalty0 215--233, 01 2009.

There is an easy way of converting references by making use of the bibtex-command. It does exactly what we needed in the background. Typesetting the document once (latex) and generating the references with the bibtex-command will create a metafile called “document.bbl”, containing all the referenced bibitems in -format.

tom@texblog:~$ latex document
tom@texblog:~$ bibtex document

Finally, just copy and paste the content of the *.bbl file into the document, overwriting \bibliography{<document>}.

Note: The bibitem above was created using:

\usepackage[numbers, square, comma, sort&compress]{natbib}

Source: fundamentalthinking.