Bibliography in Latex, already part done manually

[Czcibor]

Problem:
After more than half of my thesis I was advised to use Latex. At this moment I'm learning it, so far looks doable.
However, there is a problem of bibliography... yes, mostly manually formatted as it is supposed to look like in output file... I'd like to use Bibtex... but wouldn't it mean a nightmarish converting everything line after line?

Suggestions?
a) there is some brilliant idea to convert / merge everything [please specify]
b) just finish doing bibliography manually
c) its worth to convert those pages manually to the right format to have program to do the job

 

[Dr Transport]

I reformatted from word to LateX, not as bad as it seems. Export out the word document as text. I downloaded a program to convert all of my equations to LaTeX format (just copy and past), with little issues. The bibliography is actually easy because each item is named, just substitute the name with \ref{}. Your school should have a latex format document for the correct format.

 

[bigfooted]

I use jabref to create bibliographies. It is a very time-saving tool. There is a jabref plugin for firefox. When I see an interesting paper on elsevier or springer, I click the 'export bibliography' icon and all data will be automatically added to the jabref database. In the jabref program (a simple java database viewer/editor) I can see and edit the bibliography data and export to a number of formats.

in your case, I would install the jabref plugin, go to sciencedirect, type in some keywords describing your topic, click on everything that looks familiar and export the data. You will probably have 50% of your bibliography data saved in a couple of minutes.