Citation Generator

Start from an identifier, not a title, whenever you can

A DOI or an ISBN is an exact address for one specific work. Give the generator either and it fetches the publisher's own record - authors in the right order, the real journal name, the volume, the issue, the page range, the year. Nothing is guessed.

A title is a search, and searches are ambiguous. Two papers can share a title, a conference version and a journal version of the same work differ in ways your marker will notice, and a slightly mistyped title finds the wrong thing confidently. Titles are resolved to a DOI first where possible, but always check the result against the paper in front of you.

For books, the ISBN on the copyright page is more reliable than the one printed on the back cover, which is sometimes the paperback edition when you are holding the hardback. Edition matters for page numbers.

For a web page, paste the full URL. The page is fetched and its metadata read - title, site name, author and publication date where the site declares them. Many sites declare none of it, which is why the next section exists.

Always check what came back

Metadata is only as good as whoever entered it, and publishers enter plenty of rubbish. The recurring problems are worth knowing by sight: an author field containing a whole department, a title stuck in ALL CAPS or with its subtitle missing, a "published" date that is the online-first date rather than the issue date, and edited collections where the chapter authors and the book editors have been swapped.

Web pages are worse. A news site that omits its byline gives you a citation with no author; one that updates a page silently gives you a date that is not when the piece was written. If the page shows an author and the citation does not, add it by hand.

The generator formats what it is given. It cannot know that the record is wrong, so a clean-looking reference can still be inaccurate. Thirty seconds of checking each entry against the source is the difference between a bibliography that holds up and one that quietly does not.

Six styles, and why they disagree

APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE and Vancouver are all supported. They differ because each was designed for a different reader: APA puts the date first because currency matters in the social sciences, MLA puts the page first because you are usually pointing at a passage, and Chicago moves the whole reference into a note so heterogeneous sources fit.

IEEE and Vancouver are numeric. Your citations appear as [1], [2] and so on, numbered in the order the bibliography sits in - so if you reorder the list, the numbers change with it, and the in-text markers in your document have to change too. Sort the list the way you want it before you copy.

Chicago has two systems. Notes-and-bibliography is what historians use; author-date is what science-facing Chicago users use. They are not interchangeable, and your department will have a preference.

When your institution publishes its own house style, that wins over anything here. Departmental variants are common, particularly in law and medicine.

Getting the list into your document

Copying the whole bibliography carries the formatting with it: italics survive, and so does the hanging indent, so it lands in Word or Google Docs looking the way a bibliography should rather than as a wall of plain text you then have to reformat by hand.

The list is sorted the way your chosen style sorts a bibliography by default, and you can override that - by title, by publication date, or by the order you added things. Numeric styles renumber to match whatever order is showing.

Filtering by source type is there for the common case of needing only the journal articles, or only the books, out of a mixed list. Selecting entries lets you copy a subset without deleting the rest; select-all only ever covers what the current filter shows, so a filter can never cause a surprise bulk delete.

Your bibliography is stored in your own browser, not on our servers. It survives a reload and a closed tab, and it does not follow you to another machine. Clearing your browser data clears it, so copy anything you need to keep.

Common questions