Free Citation Generator

1. Pick your source type — Website URL, DOI, ISBN, or Manual Entry for anything else.
2. Paste the identifier — the full web address, a DOI like 10.1152/physrev.00032.2012, or a 10/13-digit ISBN.
3. Click Cite — we fetch the authors, title, container, date, and publication details automatically.
4. Switch styles and copy — the same source renders in all five styles; pick yours and copy with one click, italics preserved.

The same journal article formatted by the generator in each supported style — note how author names, dates, and italics shift between formats:

Websites — any public page. We read the page's metadata for author, title, site name, and publish date, and add the access date your style requires. Journal articles — paste the DOI and the citation is built from the CrossRef registry record, the most reliable source possible. Books — paste the ISBN from the copyright page or the back cover. Everything else — reports, lectures, interviews, podcasts, and any source without an identifier work through Manual Entry with type-specific fields.

Citation generators have a bad reputation for mangling author names, dropping italics, or using outdated edition rules. Citation[Z] formats against current editions — APA 7th, MLA 9th — and handles the edge cases that trip up most tools: organizations as authors, missing dates (n.d.), 21+ author truncation in APA, et al. rules in MLA, and title-position fallback when no author exists.

Every citation is still worth a 10-second read before submission — if a website publishes wrong metadata, the citation inherits it. Each result has an Edit button so you can fix any field without starting over.

Every result has an Add to bibliography button. Collect your sources as you work, then open the Bibliography Builder to get an alphabetized, correctly titled reference list — References, Works Cited, or Bibliography depending on style — and export it as a Word document with hanging indents and double spacing already applied.

Hand-formatted citations fail in predictable places, and graders know exactly where to look:

• Inverted-name errors — forgetting to invert (APA/Harvard), or inverting every author when the style inverts only the first (MLA, Chicago).
• Italics in the wrong place — italicizing the article title instead of the journal, or losing italics entirely when pasting between apps. Our copy button preserves them.
• Casing mismatches — Title Case in an APA title (APA wants sentence case) or sentence case in MLA (wants Title Case).
• Outdated edition rules — publisher cities (gone since APA 7), "Retrieved from" before every URL (gone), listing only 7 authors (now 20).
• Punctuation drift — the comma-vs-period-vs-colon sequence differs per style and is exactly the kind of detail humans normalize incorrectly across 20 entries.

APA 7 (psychology, education, social sciences): author–date. Initials for first names, the year right after the authors, sentence-case titles. MLA 9 (English, humanities): author–page. Full first names, Title Case, the date near the end, list titled Works Cited. Chicago (history, publishing): reads like prose, pairs with footnotes. Harvard (UK/international universities): APA's sibling with single-quoted titles and Available at: for URLs. IEEE (engineering, CS): numbered [1] references in citation order, initials before surnames.

Not sure which you need? Your syllabus decides — and if it truly doesn't, see How to Choose a Citation Style. Since every result here renders all five, picking late costs nothing.

Free, no login: unlimited generation, conversion, bibliography building, and TXT/Word export — the complete citation workflow. Free account: everything above plus saved citations, history, and projects so a semester's sources never live in a browser tab. Premium ($5/mo): the research layer — find sources by topic across 250 million scholarly works, get citation recommendations for claims in your writing, and analyze paragraphs for statements that need support. The generator itself is never paywalled.