How to print all cited references from a LaTeX file into a text file?

Question

The journal which I am submitting a paper to requires a list of references to be given separately (along with that in the manuscript PDF).

The constraints are that each reference should be given in a separate line as a numbered list and that there should be no line breaks within a reference and no blank lines in-between.

Eg.,

1. Ref1
2. Ref2
3. Ref3
...
200. Ref200

I thought of just copy-pasting the reference section from the LaTeX PDF but the outcome is awful. There are breaks between lines, groups of numbers get printed separately, then the broken list alone, and so on.

It could be done one-by-one, but there are 200 references! The bib database itself is rather large with a lot more entries than just the ones being cited.

Is there a simple way to just print all cited items to a text with the aforementioned constraints?

Answer 1

Yes! Found a solution to the problem: latex2rtf

1. To the tex file, emporarily add \onecolumn before the \bibliography command if the manuscript is in two-column format.

2. Use latex2rtf like so (install it if not already installed; TeXLive doesn't come with it)

   latex mypaper bibtex mypaper # if you use bibtex latex2rtf mypaper

3. Open the the RTF file, mypaper.rtf copy the References section and paste it on to a new text file.

For some reason, the references were not numbered in the RTF file (I used IEEEtran format), so I had to number it in the RTF before copying. Problem solved!

Note: I did notice two specific repeating structures occurring within the list, namely, plus 0.5em minus 0.4em and =2plus 43minus 4. It was a simple Find-and-Replace fix with null character, but not sure why they were there in the first place.