Citation Generator

Nobody has ever been praised for a bibliography

It is late. The argument is finished, the conclusion is written, and what remains is forty minutes of deciding whether the volume number goes in italics and whether there is a comma before the year.

You cannot gain marks for this. You can lose them. It is pure tax, payable at the end, when you are least equipped to pay it — and it is the part of academic writing that most obviously could be done by a machine, which is presumably why you are here.

Why there are three styles, and what each one is actually for

The styles look like arbitrary punctuation preferences invented to torment students. They are not. Each one puts the thing its discipline cares about closest to the reader's eye, and once you see that, the rules stop being random.

Which is why you do not get to choose. Your department chose, decades ago, for reasons that made sense in that field. This tool covers all three — APA 7th, MLA 9th and Chicago in its bibliography form — across websites, books and journal articles.

The same source, three ways

One journal article, formatted by each style. Watch what moves.

Same four facts in all three: who, when, what, where. APA gives you the initial and hides the title in sentence case. MLA spells the first name out and capitalises the title properly. Chicago drops the volume abbreviation and parks the year in brackets. None of it changes the meaning and all of it is marked.

What this tool will not do, and why that matters more than it used to

It cannot tell you whether the source exists.

A citation generator takes the details you give it and formats them. It has no way of checking that the article is real, that the author wrote it, that the page number is right, or that the journal published anything that year. Give it invented details and it will produce a beautifully formatted invention.

That used to be a footnote. It is now the most important thing on this page, because a great many references currently reaching markers were produced by AI tools that fabricated them — plausible author, plausible journal, plausible volume number, no such paper. They look exactly like real citations, which is the problem, and the person who gets caught is the one who submitted them.

So the rule is simple and worth holding to: only cite things you have actually opened. Not things you found in another paper's bibliography, not things a chatbot mentioned, not things you are fairly sure exist. If you have not seen the source, you cannot honestly cite it, and a formatter cannot rescue you.

It also will not know your department's local variations. Most institutions have a house style sheet that departs from the official manual in small ways — whether to include a DOI, how to handle more than twenty authors, what to do with an undated web page. Check it once, at the start, rather than discovering the difference in the feedback.

The mistakes that actually cost marks

• Mixing styles within one document. The single most common, and the most visible. It usually happens when half the bibliography came from a journal's "cite this" button and half was typed by hand. Pick one and regenerate everything.
• An in-text citation with no matching reference. Or the reverse. Both look like carelessness and one of them looks like something worse. Read the two lists against each other before submitting.
• Citing the database rather than the source. JSTOR and ProQuest are not publishers. The article was published in a journal; the database is just where you found it.
• Forgetting the hanging indent. All three styles want the first line flush and subsequent lines indented. It is a two-second formatting change and its absence is the first thing a marker notices, because it is visible before any of the words are read.
• Assuming the tool got the author order right. Generators format what they are given. If you typed the authors in the wrong order, you get a perfectly formatted wrong order.

Things people actually ask

Related: essay word counter, how to cut word count, words to pages, the word count guide.