DSpace to BibTeX

Generate BibTeX citations for LaTeX directly from DSpace repositories.
Paste a DSpace item URL (handle, item UI, or REST endpoint) and instantly get a ready-to-use .bib entry.

Supports DSpace 6 (JSPUI) and DSpace 7+ (REST API), designed for academic repositories such as theses, articles, and technical reports.

🚀 Try the live application: https://dspace2tex.illapa.dev/

Features

• Generate BibTeX from DSpace repository URLs
• Supports DSpace 6 (/handle/... with ?mode=full)
• Supports DSpace 7+ (/items/<uuid> and REST API)
• Automatic Dublin Core metadata extraction
• Smart BibTeX entry type detection (thesis, article, techreport, misc)
• Safe server-side fetching (SSRF protection, size & timeout limits)
• Built with Next.js Server Actions

Supported URL types

The tool automatically detects the correct strategy based on the URL.

DSpace 7 (REST API)

• /server/api/core/items/<uuid>
• /api/core/items/<uuid>
• /items/<uuid> (resolved via REST)

DSpace 6 / 7 (Handle UI)

• /handle/<authority>/<id>
  Tries REST first, falls back to ?mode=full HTML parsing

Examples

https://repositorio.usfq.edu.ec/handle/23000/14349
https://repositorio.uta.edu.ec/items/232db8b3-ad43-41ca-b4c8-8166eb70241c
https://repositorio.uta.edu.ec/server/api/core/items/232db8b3-ad43-41ca-b4c8-8166eb70241c

BibTeX output

The generated BibTeX entry is inferred from Dublin Core metadata.

Metadata mapping

• Authors: dc.contributor.author, dc.creator
• Title: dc.title
• Year: extracted from dc.date.*
• URL: dc.identifier.uri
• Institution / Publisher:
  • school for theses
  • institution for technical reports
  • note for articles when journal is not applicable

Example

@thesis{Perez2021modelos,
  author = {Pérez, Juan},
  title = {Modelos de optimización en redes},
  year = {2021},
  school = {Universidad Técnica de Ambato},
  url = {https://repositorio.uta.edu.ec/handle/123456789/9999}
}

Security considerations

All remote requests are executed server-side with strict safety controls:

• SSRF protection (blocks localhost and private IPs)
• Redirect limit
• Request timeout
• Maximum response size
• Content-Type validation (HTML or JSON only)

Tech stack

• Next.js (App Router)
• React
• TypeScript
• cheerio
• he

Limitations

• Only Dublin Core metadata is supported
• BibTeX output only
• Single-item processing

License

MIT