RIS (file format)

RIS is a standardized tag format developed by Research Information Systems, Incorporated (the format name refers to the company) to enable citation programs to exchange data. It is supported by a number of reference managers. Many digital libraries, like IEEE Xplore, Scopus, the ACM Portal, Scopemed, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, Rayyan, Accordance Bible Software, and online library catalogs can export citations in this format. Citation management applications can export and import citations in this format.

Format
The RIS file format—two letters, two spaces and a hyphen—is a tagged format for expressing bibliographic citations. According to the specifications, the lines must end with the ASCII carriage return and line feed characters. Note that this is the convention on Microsoft Windows, while in other contemporary operating systems, particularly Unix, the end of line is typically marked by line feed only.

Multiple citation records can be present in a single RIS file. A record ends with an "end record" tag ER - with no additional blank lines between records.

Example record
This is an example of how the article "Claude E. Shannon. A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 27:379–423, July 1948" would be expressed in the RIS file format:

TY - JOUR AU - Shannon, Claude E. PY  - 1948 DA - July TI - A Mathematical Theory of Communication T2 - Bell System Technical Journal SP - 379 EP - 423 VL - 27 ER -

Example multi-record format
This is an example of how two citation records would be expressed in a single RIS file. Note the first record ends with ER - and the second record begins with TY - JOUR:

TY - JOUR AU - Shannon, Claude E. PY  - 1948 DA - July TI - A Mathematical Theory of Communication T2 - Bell System Technical Journal SP - 379 EP - 423 VL - 27 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem A1 - Turing, Alan Mathison JO - Proc. of London Mathematical Society VL - 47 IS - 1 SP - 230 EP - 265 Y1 - 1937 ER -

Tags
The TY - tag must appear first and the ER - tag must appear last. Most tags must appear at most once, but the author, keyword, and URL tags can be repeated.

Each name must be formatted as a comma-separated list of last name, first name (including middle names, can be initials), and suffix, in that order, and must not be longer than 255 characters. Unless otherwise specified, each date must be formatted as a slash-separated list of 4-digit year, 2-digit month, 2-digit day, and other info (e.g. season); unused fields may be omitted if they are at the end.

Many strings have limits on what characters they can contain (e.g. any ASCII character, just alphanumerics, or just digits) or their length (often limited to 255 characters). These are only sometimes noted in the table below; see the linked sources to double-check, particularly and the pages in RIS Format Specifications.

There are two major versions of the RIS specification, one from 2001, and one from the end of 2011 with different lists of tags for each type of record, sometimes with different meanings. Below is an excerpt of the main RIS tags, from both versions. Except for  and , order of tags is free and their inclusion is optional.

Type of reference
The type of reference preceded by the TY - tag must abbreviated as: