How to use the citation generator
- Choose a Citation style, or All styles to see every format at once.
- Pick the Source type: Book, Journal article or Web page.
- Enter Authors (one per line: Family, Given names), the Title, the Year, and the fields for your source type, such as Publisher, Journal, Volume, Issue, Pages, Website name, DOI or URL.
- Add a Page cited if you need a page in the note or in-text citation.
- Copy the formatted reference (with italics), or the plain-text version below it. Add each entry to your reference list.
What it does and when to use it
Every style has its own rules for the order of names, where the year goes, which parts are italic and how page ranges are written. Getting these right by hand for every source is slow. The generator builds the reference from the details you type, and shows the in-text citation too: the author-date form for APA, Harvard and Chicago author-date, the author-page form for MLA, the bracketed number for IEEE, and full and short footnotes for Chicago notes-bibliography.
It warns when an important detail is missing, such as the publisher of a book or the URL of a web page.
To collect several sources into one sorted reference list, use the bibliography builder. For help with in-text forms such as two or more authors and page ranges, see the in-text citation helper. Writing to a word limit? The essay word counter keeps track.
How it works
The tool turns your fields into a structured source (authors split into family and given names, initials worked out for APA, Harvard and IEEE), then applies the rules of each style: APA 7th edition, MLA 9th edition, Chicago 17th edition (author-date and notes-bibliography), Harvard as set out in Cite Them Right (12th edition), and IEEE. It formats page ranges with an en dash and abbreviates them where a style says so, and joins authors with “&” or “and” as each style requires. Everything runs in your browser.
Worked examples
These references come from the generator, using its built-in book example (Grazer and Fishman, A Curious Mind, Simon & Schuster, 2015, page 12).
APA 7. Grazer, B., & Fishman, C. (2015). A curious mind: The secret to a bigger life. Simon & Schuster. In text: (Grazer & Fishman, 2015, p. 12).
Chicago 17 first note. Brian Grazer and Charles Fishman, A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 12. The short note is “Grazer and Fishman, Curious Mind, 12.”
MLA 9 web page. Caroline Bologna’s 2019 HuffPost article gives Bologna, Caroline. “Why Some People with Anxiety Love Watching Horror Movies.” HuffPost, 31 Oct. 2019, followed by the URL without https://, as MLA prefers.
Limits and tips
- Three source types only: books, journal articles and web pages. Book chapters, videos and reports are not supported yet.
- Editors and translators are not separate fields; add them by hand.
- Italics are lost in plain text. Paste the formatted version into your document, or re-apply italics to titles.
- Check your institution’s version of Harvard, since many universities have their own variant.
Frequently asked questions
Which citation style should I use?
How should I type the title?
How do I enter an organisation as the author?
Can I trust the output without checking?
Which edition of Chicago does it follow?
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