Citation Generator: APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard references. Input: Text you type or paste and values you enter. Output: Results shown on the page and text to copy. Privacy: Runs in your browser: inputs and files stay on your device and are not uploaded.
How to create a citation
- Choose the citation style your teacher or journal asks for: APA 7th, MLA 9th, Chicago 17th (bibliography) or Harvard.
- Paste a DOI or ISBN and press Fill in to complete the fields from the publisher's record, or choose the source type and fill in the details yourself: authors (one per line), title, website or journal name, date, volume and pages, publisher, and URL or DOI. The lookup sends only that number to doi.org or Open Library; everything else stays in your browser.
- The formatted reference and the matching in-text citation appear instantly. Copy with italics to paste into Word or Google Docs, or add it to your list, which is sorted alphabetically for your bibliography. In APA and Harvard, works by the same authors in the same year get 2020a, 2020b and so on in title order; use the same letter in the in-text citation.
Getting citations right
Each style orders the same information differently. APA, used in psychology, education and the sciences, puts the year straight after the authors and uses initials and sentence case for titles. MLA, common in the humanities, uses full names, title case, quotation marks for articles and includes an access date for web pages. Chicago bibliography style uses full names and title case and is favoured in history; Harvard is an author–date style widely used in UK universities, with many local variations. Titles of books, journals and websites are italicised; titles of articles are not.
Always check the result against your institution's guide, especially for unusual sources, capitalisation of proper nouns in APA's sentence case, and the exact Harvard variant your university uses. Collect DOIs for journal articles when you can: they are permanent links that publishers maintain. Your reference list is saved in this browser only, so copy it into your document when you finish.
What is the difference between APA and MLA?
APA uses author–date in-text citations like (Smith, 2024) and a reference list; MLA uses author–page like (Smith 45) and a works cited list with full first names.
What if there is no author?
Leave authors empty. The title moves to the author position, as the styles require.
Do I need the access date?
MLA recommends it for web pages that may change; Harvard usually requires it. APA 7 does not, unless the page is designed to change over time.