[shoeffner]

What do you mean? I tried placing Ö and {\"O} in the author's name of the example and tidied it:

    Click Tidy to clean up the entries below      
    @Book{sweig42,
      Author =  { Stef{\"O}{n} SwÖig },
      title =  { The impossible book },
      publisher =  { Dead Poet Society},
      year =  1942,
      month =        mar
    }

This is the output:

    Click Tidy to clean up the entries below
    @book{sweig42,
     title        = {The impossible book},
     author       = {Stef{\"O}{n} SwÖig},
     year         = 1942,
     month        = mar,
     publisher    = {Dead Poet Society}
    }

And \"O should be Ö, so I guess I do not really understand what is "incorrect" in your use case.

I know that the Zoteroplugin BetterBibTeX converts Ö to {\"O} when exporting as BibTeX, but keeps it as Ö when exporting as BibLaTeX – maybe Kbibtex has similar options?

edit: It actually "fixes" Ö to {\"O} if you tick "Escape special characters" or supply the command line argument `--escape`, which should be the default according to GitHub.

[jonathanstrange]

I meant leaving the Ö as is or even introducing it, which is always wrong with Bibtex. I'm not using Zotero but Jabref also fixes it. There was an Ö in an author name and when I manually changed it to {\"O} Kbibtex reverted it back to an Ö! It's easy to fix by switching to XeTeX but some editorial systems don't use it and will make your manuscript fail.

I was just hoping that the tool fixes this problem, too. Maybe in a future version.