Is it acceptable to ask for the original bibtex file of a paper? I am reading a review paper which includes hundreds of useful citations for my paper. I would like to import some of the citations into a bibtex file. The only thing I know to do is to search them on google one by one, and then click on "export bibtex".

Is it acceptable (ethical) to ask the author of a paper for the original bibtex (Latex) file?

Or I wonder if there are any program could do the repetitive job: searching each citation on google one by one and export the bibtex from google scholar.



Thanks for the Scopus answer. It works for most of the published (not working papers, though) papers!!
I would consider this a perfectly reasonable, if unusual, request.

That probably has a lot to do with the culture of my field; most papers in particle physics are uploaded to arXiv as LaTeX source (though .bib files are often not included), which is then made available to download along with the rendered PDF. This facilitates a cultural expectation that source code to the paper should be available to readers, not hidden. So I would consider sharing the BibTeX file associated with a paper to be a reasonable thing to do, a professional courtesy of sorts - similar to what sharing a copy of the paper itself is or used to be.

Other fields may think differently. Still, in most cases I would think it's fine to ask. The author can always say no or ignore your request, if they don't want their file to be shared for some reason.