Bibliography builder — a sorted reference list in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard or IEEE

How to use the bibliography builder

1. In Sources, write each source as lines of field: value, with a blank line between sources. The sample shows a book, a journal article and a web page.
2. Use the fields type (book, journal or website), author, year or date (YYYY-MM-DD), title, and then the ones that fit: edition, publisher, place, journal, volume, issue, pages, doi, url, site, accessed.
3. Choose the Style: APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 17 author-date, Chicago 17 notes-bibliography, Harvard (Cite Them Right) or IEEE.
4. Leave Title capitalisation on “Adjust per style”, or choose “Exactly as typed”.
5. Copy or print the list. Its heading follows the style: Works Cited for MLA, Bibliography for Chicago notes, References for the rest.

What it does and when to use it

At the end of an essay, every source must be listed in the same format and order. The builder applies the style’s rules to the whole list at once and sorts it, so you only check the result.

To format a single source with its in-text citation in every style, the citation generator is quicker. The in-text citation helper gives the matching citation inside your sentences, and the essay outline builder helps plan where each source goes.

How it works

Each block becomes one source. Field names are not case-sensitive, and aliases such as vol, no, city and website work. If you leave out the type, a block with a journal is read as an article, a block with a URL and no publisher as a web page, and anything else as a book. A full date such as 2019-10-31 fills in the year, month and day.

Titles should be typed in sentence case. With “Adjust per style”, MLA and Chicago titles and IEEE book titles are changed to title case, while APA and Harvard keep sentence case. Page ranges get an en dash. Lines that are not “field: value”, unknown fields and blocks without a title are listed as warnings. All formatting runs in your browser.

Worked examples

These use the three sample sources.

APA 7. Sorted Baron, Bologna, Grazer. The book reads Grazer, B., & Fishman, C. (2015). A curious mind: The secret to a bigger life. Simon & Schuster.

MLA 9. The article becomes Baron, Naomi S. “Redefining Reading: The Impact of Digital Communication Media.” PMLA, vol. 128, no. 1, Jan. 2013, pp. 193–200.

IEEE. The list keeps the typed order, so the book is [1] and Baron’s article is [2] N. S. Baron, ….

A mistake. A block with only author, year and “notes: borrowed from library” gives two warnings: unknown field “notes” and “Source 1: a title is required.”

Limits and tips

• Editors, translators and page numbers for a whole book are not handled.
• Harvard web pages need an accessed date in Cite Them Right; add accessed: to the block.
• In APA, when the author and publisher are the same organisation the publisher is usually left out; remove it by hand.
• Treat the output as a first draft; your institution’s rules come first.