You might of course want to try this: <subject> <topic class="primary">math.DG</topic> </subject> It depends on your model (DTD) for the XML format.
Take the following test.bib file: @Article{arxiv:1412.8142v1, author={Manev, Hristo}, title={Almost contact B-metric structures and the Bianchi classification of the\n three-dimensional Lie algebras}, journal={arXiv}, year={2014}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, eprint={1412.8142v1}, eprintclass={math.DG}, url={http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.8142v1} } and pass it to bib2xml: bib2xml test.bib It produces an XML file that does not contain the 'math.DG' string, i.e. lacks information about 'eprintclass'. That's a...