As pointed out by Juergen, I should save my bibtex file as latin1 encoding because I would likely get into problem with a UTF-8 encoded bibliography. He further pointed out I should get all non-ascii character escaped.
I resaved my existing bibliography in JabRef using latin-1 encoding, and all my child document works fine. The problem arise when I build from my master document, and I get tons of error: e.g. Missing $ inserted. .. Surg Br}, 84-B\penalty0 (SUPP_ I):\penalty0 65--c, \url Missing \endgroup inserted {http://proceedings.ieee/cgi/content/abstract/84-B/SUPP_I/... The control sequence at the end of the top line Latex Error: Lonely Item -- Perhaps a missing \list environment etc It looks like it is because my bib is not properly escaped. I am wondering what is the best way to apply proper escape sequence to existing bibliography database (~200 entries). Juergen suggested using "recode l1..ltex myfile.bib" but mentioned there maybe chance that it mis-transform "\" to "\backslash". Despite the backslash problem (-d option just give me Recoding reference_articles.bib... failed: Untranslatable input in step `ISO-8859-1..LaTeX', and failed to convert), my doc now compiles without error. At the same time, all my bibliography attached at the end of the doc is almost empty with a few "a." "b." "c." as the first character! and my bib is formatted like this: @ARTICLE\{someone2008, author = \{someone\}, title = \{The title\}, journal = \{J something\}, year = \{2008\}, Any insight on how I should fix the problem, or deal with the problem is very much appreciated. Abe