I once had to step away from one of my usual habits: writing everything in LaTeX. For a paper prepared in Word, I ran into a more practical problem. Because the article involved a systematic mapping exercise, I needed to move my references from Mendeley into a CSV file that I could then use in Excel.

That was new to me. I was used to working only with BibTeX databases. After some searching, I did not find a clean one-step solution, so I settled on a workflow that turned out to be simple, robust, and easy to repeat.

Step 1: Export from Mendeley to BibTeX

In Mendeley Desktop:

  1. Go to File > Export
  2. Choose BibTeX (*.bib) as the export format

Step 2: Open the file in JabRef

If you already use LaTeX, you may know JabRef. If not, it is a useful free tool for working with BibTeX files.

  1. Open JabRef
  2. Go to File > Open database
  3. Select the .bib file exported from Mendeley

Step 3: Export from JabRef to CSV

Once the BibTeX file is open in JabRef:

  1. Go to File > Export
  2. Choose CSV (*.csv) as the output format

Step 4: Import the CSV file into Excel

In Excel:

  1. Open a new workbook
  2. Go to the Data tab
  3. Choose From Text/CSV
  4. Select your exported CSV file
  5. Choose a comma-delimited import
  6. Finish the import and review the columns

It is not a one-click workflow, but it works reliably and is still much better than manually typing references into a spreadsheet. Once the data is in CSV format, it becomes much easier to sort, filter, and extract the information needed for a review or mapping exercise.