Journal Citation Generator
Updated September 2026
Paste the article's DOI into the DOI tab below — it's on the first page of the PDF and the article's landing page — and the citation is built from the publisher's CrossRef record: the full author list, journal, volume, issue, pages, all exact.
Journal articles carry the most metadata of any source type, which makes them the worst to type by hand and the best to automate.
We'll identify it and build your citation.
One article, five styles
Rasch, B., & Born, J. (2013). About sleep's role in memory. Physiological Reviews, 93(2), 681-766. https://doi.org/10.1152/physrev.00032.2012
In-text(Rasch & Born, 2013)
Rasch, Björn, and Jan Born. "About sleep's role in memory." Physiological Reviews, vol. 93, no. 2, 2013, pp. 681-766, https://doi.org/10.1152/physrev.00032.2012.
In-text(Rasch and Born 681)
Rasch, Björn, and Jan Born. "About sleep's role in memory." Physiological Reviews 93, no. 2 (2013): 681-766. https://doi.org/10.1152/physrev.00032.2012.
In-text(Rasch and Born 2013)
Rasch, B. and Born, J. (2013) 'About sleep's role in memory', Physiological Reviews, 93(2), pp. 681-766.
In-text(Rasch and Born, 2013)
B. Rasch and J. Born, "About sleep's role in memory," Physiological Reviews, vol. 93, no. 2, pp. 681-766, 2013. doi: 10.1152/physrev.00032.2012.
In-text[1]
Decoding the article's numbers
Volume is the year's bound set, issue the installment within it — 93(2) in APA, vol. 93, no. 2 in MLA/IEEE. The page range is the article's full span in the journal (the specific page you quote goes in the in-text citation instead). The DOI ends the entry in every style — as a live link in APA/MLA, after the pages in Chicago, as doi: 10.xxxx in IEEE.
The universal italics rule
Across all five styles: the article title is never italicized (plain in APA, quoted in MLA/Chicago/IEEE/Harvard), the journal name always is. Casing flips by style — APA sentence-cases the article title; MLA and Chicago Title-Case it. Getting this pair right by hand across 15 references is exactly the tedium the generator removes.
Article edge cases
- No page numbers (online-only journals) — the article number stands in: Article e0285.
- Preprints — cite the repository (arXiv, bioRxiv) as the source; switch to the journal version once it exists.
- In-press articles — APA marks (in press) where the year would go.
- No DOI (mostly pre-2000) — fall back to the journal's URL or the print form.
- Database access (JSTOR, EBSCO) — current styles cite the article, not the database; the DOI suffices.
Keep every citation you make.
A free account saves your citation history and organizes sources into projects with notes and tags.
Create a free account →Find the sources you should be citing.
Premium searches 250 million scholarly works by topic, recommends citations for your claims, and flags statements in your writing that need support.
Go Premium — $5/monthFrequently asked questions
- Where's the DOI on a journal article?
- First page of the PDF (header or footer) and the article's landing page, usually near the title or in the Cite panel. Any format works here — bare, https://doi.org/…, or dx.doi.org.
- Which pages go in the citation?
- The full article range (681–766) in the reference entry; the specific quoted page in the in-text citation: (Rasch & Born, 2013, p. 685).
- How do I cite an article I read through my university library?
- Cite the article itself with its DOI — the proxy URL in your browser's address bar is access plumbing, not the source, and won't work for anyone else.
- Magazine or newspaper articles too?
- Those follow the periodical patterns with dates instead of volume/issue — paste the article's URL into the Website tab and the right format is applied.