Citation Generator

How to use it

• Find a source — paste a web address, a DOI (with or without “doi:” or doi.org), an ISBN-10 or ISBN-13, a PubMed ID or an arXiv ID, or type a title, and press Enter or Search. The line under the box says what was recognised. An ISBN whose check digit is wrong is refused before anything is sent. A title search lists up to five matches from Crossref and Open Library; Open Library's are works rather than editions, so add the publisher and year of the edition you used.
• Check the details — whatever is found opens in the form, with the reference and in-text citation as your style prints them. A lookup that fails opens the form with what was known, such as the address and today's date.
• Enter by hand — 12 kinds of source, from webpage to AI-generated content, plus Other for anything else. Contributors can be authors, editors or translators, each a person (given names, particle such as “van”, family name, suffix such as “Jr.”) or an organisation, kept whole. Dates take a year with or without a month or season and a day; a web source starts with today as its access date.
• Warnings — under each reference, what the style asks for and the source lacks, and what the reference shows instead, such as “APA: no date; it will show (n.d.)”.
• Sentence case — APA, Harvard, Vancouver and IEEE set titles in sentence case, but databases give them in title case. The form shows the title converted, keeping words such as NASA and iPhone, for you to accept: names and other proper nouns need a person to put back.
• Bibliographies — keep several named lists. Author-date and MLA lists sort themselves; Vancouver and IEEE number sources in the order you add them, which Move up and Move down change. Each source can be edited, duplicated or deleted, with Undo.
• Copy and export — Copy bibliography puts the references on the clipboard with their italics and hanging indents, for Word or Google Docs; Copy as plain text drops the formatting. Export saves the list as RIS, BibTeX or CSL-JSON, and Import reads any of the three.

Where your data goes

Your bibliographies are saved in this browser's storage and are never sent anywhere. Looking a source up sends only what you typed:

• A DOI to doi.org, and to Crossref if doi.org does not answer; an arXiv ID as its DOI.
• An ISBN to Open Library, then Crossref.
• A PubMed ID to the US National Library of Medicine's E-utilities.
• A title search to Crossref and Open Library.
• A web address to this site, which fetches the page and returns only the citation details it declares (such as its title, authors, dates and site name), keeping nothing.

Each service sees your IP address, as any website does. Lookups go out without a referrer, so they do not say which page sent them.

Examples

One article in every style

What each style asks for

APA 7th edition — author and date in the text, “(Kwon, 2022)”. Titles of articles and books in sentence case; journal names in title case, in italics with the volume. A DOI is written as a link. A source with no date shows “n.d.”; a retrieval date is given only for a page whose content changes and is not archived.

MLA 9th edition — the author in the text, with the page when you quote. Titles in title case, containers such as journals and websites in italics. Web addresses are given without “https://”, but a DOI keeps “https://doi.org/”. Three or more authors become the first followed by “et al.”.

Harvard (Cite Them Right 13th edition) — author and date in the text. The 13th edition drops the place of publication, writes “article” before an article number, and adds AI-generated content as a source type; library guides to it also set reference-list titles in sentence case. Online sources end with “Available at:” and the date accessed.

Chicago 18th edition — two systems. Notes and bibliography gives a full note the first time a source is cited and a short note after that; author-date puts “(Kwon 2022)” in the text. Titles in title case. An online source with no date gives the date it was accessed.

Vancouver (NLM Citing Medicine) — sources numbered in the order they are first cited. Authors as family name and initials without full stops (“Petitti DB”), journal names abbreviated as in the NLM catalogue, titles in sentence case with the word after a colon in lower case.

IEEE — sources numbered in square brackets in the order cited. Initials before the family name; article titles in quotation marks and sentence case, book and journal titles in italics; “Art. no.” for an article number.

The styles are the Citation Style Language files the CSL project publishes, pinned at one version, apart from Harvard: the project's Cite Them Right file follows the 12th edition, so the generator uses an adaptation of it for the 13th. Where a style file prints something its manual does not, such as an en dash where Citing Medicine uses a hyphen in page ranges, the tool's tests record the difference.

Sources

• Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition; APA Style reference examples — American Psychological Association
• MLA Handbook, 9th edition; MLA Style Center — Modern Language Association
• Cite Them Right, 13th edition — Bloomsbury
• The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition: Citation Quick Guide — University of Chicago Press
• Citing Medicine, 2nd edition — National Library of Medicine
• IEEE Reference Style Guide for Authors — IEEE

Reviewed 22 October 2026

Frequently asked questions

See also

• Word & Character Counter — Count the words of an essay, with or without its reference list.
• Case Converter — Turn a list of titles into sentence or title case in one go.
• Searchable PDF (OCR) — Make a scanned article searchable before quoting it.