Citation Generator

How to use the citation generator

1. Choose a Citation style: APA 7th edition, MLA 9th edition, Chicago 18th ed. (author-date) or Chicago 18th ed. (notes and bibliography).
2. Choose the Source type: Book, Journal article, Web page, Chapter in an edited book or Report. Only the fields that type needs are shown.
3. Type the Authors (one per line), then the title and the other details you have: year, journal or website name, volume, issue, pages, edition, publisher, DOI or URL.
4. Optionally enter a Page cited (in-text, optional) to get an in-text citation or footnote pointing to that page.
5. Click Create citation. The reference list entry and the in-text citations appear below and update as you edit.
6. Click Copy with formatting to paste into Word, Google Docs or LibreOffice with italics and a hanging indent, or Copy as plain text for anything else.
7. To build a bibliography, click Add to my list after each source. Copy the list copies every entry, sorted as the style requires; Empty the list starts over.

Show an example fills the form with the journal article used in the APA Style examples, so you can see every output at once.

Entering authors correctly

Put one person per line, either as “Collins, Suzanne” or “Suzanne Collins”. The tool shows how it understood each name, so check the Authors understood as: line before copying. Particles such as van, de or von stay with the family name (“Vincent van Gogh” is filed as van Gogh in APA and MLA, as Gogh, Vincent van in Chicago), and suffixes like Jr. or III are recognized. A group author such as “World Health Organization” or a ministry is kept whole; for any other group name, wrap it in braces, for example {Procter & Gamble}.

The styles decide how many authors to show: APA lists up to 20 names and uses “et al.” in the text from three authors on, MLA uses “et al.” from three authors, and Chicago shortens long lists in notes.

What each style produces

• APA 7th edition: author–date reference, e.g. Grady, J. S., Her, M., … (2019), with a parenthetical citation (Grady et al., 2019) and a narrative one, Grady et al. (2019).
• MLA 9th edition: works-cited entry with the container structure (journal, volume, number, year, pages) and an author–page citation such as (Goldman 75).
• Chicago author-date: reference with the year after the author and a citation like (Pollan 2006, 99–100).
• Chicago notes and bibliography: a bibliography entry, a full first footnote and the shortened note for later mentions, e.g. Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 3.

Formatting is done by the official Citation Style Language (CSL) styles, the same open styles used by Zotero and Mendeley, run entirely in your browser.

Tips and limits

Type titles in sentence case: APA keeps them that way, while MLA and Chicago automatically capitalize the major words. Journal and website names should be typed as officially written. Leave the year empty if there is no date: APA and Chicago then write “n.d.”. A DOI is preferred over a URL for articles, and a doi.org link typed in the URL field is recognized.

This tool does not look up DOIs, ISBNs or web pages online: fetching that metadata would send what you are citing to a third-party server, so for privacy you enter the details yourself. Always compare the result with your instructor’s or publisher’s requirements, which can differ from the official manuals.