Paste a source. Get the citation.

How it works

1. Paste what you have. A link to a web page, article or video; a DOI such as 10.2147/NSS.S62907; or a book’s ISBN from the back cover or the library catalog. A DOI is read from Crossref, an ISBN from Open Library, and a link from the page’s own citation tags.
2. Check what it found. The citation appears at once, and anything the lookup could not find is marked in the form. Add it if your source has it; the citation updates as you type.
3. Copy it. The entry and the in-text citation each have a Copy button. Type a page number beside the in-text citation and it goes in, in the form your style uses.

No link? Choose Fill in the form instead, pick the kind of source, and type only the fields it asks for. There are 31 kinds, from journal articles and YouTube videos to court cases, podcasts and AI chats.

Which style to choose

Your assignment sheet or syllabus names the style. If it does not, ask; each field has a usual one:

• MLA 9English, literature, languages and most humanities classes.
• APA 7Psychology, nursing, education, business and the social sciences.
• Chicago 18, notesHistory, art history and religion: footnotes plus a bibliography.
• Chicago 18, author-dateSome sciences and social sciences that use Chicago.
• HarvardMany UK and Australian universities, as Cite Them Right sets it out.
• IEEEEngineering and computer science: numbered references.

Switch the style at any time. The citation and your whole list are rewritten in the new style, titles recapitalized to match.

What a lookup can and cannot know

Journal articles with a DOI come back complete: authors, title, journal, volume, issue, pages and year, straight from the publisher’s record. Books found by ISBN usually have the author, title, publisher and year, but not the edition or the city.

Web pages vary. Many name no author or no date, and the generator will not invent one. MLA then starts with the title and adds the date you visited; APA writes (n.d.) for no date. If the page does show a date or author somewhere the tags missed, type it in.

Titles arrive however the publisher typed them, so the generator capitalizes them the way your style asks: title case for MLA and Chicago, sentence case for APA and Harvard. Sentence case cannot tell a name from an ordinary word, so put the capitals back on names like Darwin or Chicago, or choose Keep it as typed.

Your list, and hanging indents

Every citation you make joins the list under the tool. Copy all gives the whole list with its heading, sorted the way your style sorts it: by the first author’s last name (or the title, with A, An and The skipped), or for IEEE by number in the order you added sources.

Pasted into Word or Google Docs, the entries keep their italics, double spacing and a half-inch hanging indent, where every line after the first is indented. If your word processor drops the formatting, set the hanging indent yourself in a few clicks. The Works Cited guide has the rest of the page’s rules.

The same formatter as the Format app

Format is a writing app for college papers, and this generator runs its formatter. Every example on Format’s citation guides comes from the same code and is checked in its tests against the published examples in each style’s manual.

In the app you write on a page already set up in your style, cite as you type, and export a Word or PDF file with the Works Cited or References page built from your sources. MLA and APA are free there; Chicago, Harvard and IEEE are part of Pro. Here, every style is free.

Questions