Using BibDB bibliographies is a great way of saving time, especially at hectic moments like thesis submission - you don't want to check if the inverted commas are all right in your bibliography, or if a paper should be 2003a instead of 2003b...

Unfortunately, this implies entering the bibliography into BibDB, which can be a bit of a pain - and most of us probably do not discount correctly the distant benefits of a nice database.

A solution is to download all your entries from Econlit, which involves very little typing, and use elit2bib, a great Perl script from Marc Muendler and Tiago Ribeiro, to convert them to Bibtex.

Unfortunately, this involves installing ActivePerl, and using it to run the script. This is not a very big effort, but sometimes you may not have the right permissions to install ActivePerl, or you might just not like to fiddle with a script.

The solution is Econlit2BibTeX, which is simply a version of elit2bib for Windows compiled with Perl2Exe.

The instructions are very simple:

1. Of course, you should read elit2bib's included documentation.

2. Use Econlit to compile your bibliography and save it as download.dat IMPORTANT: YOU SHOULD MAKE SURE THAT YOU CHOSE TO DOWNLOAD ALL AVAILABLE FIELDS - MOST DEFAULT CONFIGURATIONS OF ECONLIT EXCLUDE IMPORTANT FIELDS FROM THE DOWNLOAD LIST (DT, TI, AU, YR, PUBLICATION ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT AND THE BARE MINIMUM).

3. Put Econlit2BibTeX.exe in the same folder as the download.dat file and double click on the executable.

4. Start using your newly created download.bib file!

If you have any suggestions, if you find any bugs, or if I am in breach of any copyright/licensing or other regulations, please drop me a line.

Pseudo license/disclaimer: you may distribute this program and do what you wish with it as long as you give full credit to elit2bib's creators Marc Muendler and Tiago Ribeiro. If you improve it in any way it would be nice from you to share it with the rest of us. Needless to say, neither me, nor elit2bib's creators, nor anyone at ActivePerl, Econlit or Perl2Exe are responsible for any disaster that might happen to your computer as a consequence of Econlit2BibTeX. Enjoy at your own risk.