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APA Citation Generator

I remember the first reference list I ever handed in. It was a 900-word essay, and the references took up half a page. I had the sources in there somewhere, but the formatting was a mess — one URL in blue, one article title in quotation marks, a year floating on its own. My professor circled the whole thing and wrote “look up a style guide.” That was a fair comment, and it took me about four tries to get it right.

Most students are not lazy about citations. They just never got taught the small mechanical rules, and the rules differ by department. APA, MLA, and Chicago all want the same facts — who wrote it, when, what it is called, where it lives — but they want them in a different order with different punctuation. Once you see that, the whole thing stops being scary. It is a template, not a talent.

So that is what this generator is. Fill in the source once, pick the style your course uses, and you get the reference list entry plus the in-text citation to match. Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored on a server, and no account is involved.

Starting with a link? Paste the article, video, or website address into the first box and the generator will fill the URL, website name, and a title guess. You can then correct the author, date, and title instead of typing everything from scratch. Browsers cannot read every page automatically, so the link is a fast starting point rather than a promise of perfect metadata.

Paste a link to start, or type the source once and get a reference list entry plus the in-text citation to match, in APA 7th, MLA 9th, Chicago 17th, or Harvard. Nothing is uploaded — the citation is built in your browser.

Quick start:

Leave the first name blank for a group author, for example a university or a government department. Every entry is built from the fields you fill in here, so a blank field stays blank instead of being guessed.

What this citation generator gives you

Two lines every time, because that is what an assignment actually needs:

  • The reference list entry — the full entry that goes at the end of your paper, with the italics in the right place.
  • The in-text citation — the parenthetical version you drop in the middle of a sentence, like (Vaswani et al., 2017).

Eight source types are supported: books, journal articles, webpages, whole websites, reports, newspaper or magazine articles, video or lecture recordings, and blog posts. Four styles: APA 7th, MLA 9th, Chicago 17th, and Harvard.

It also tells you what is missing. If you forget the year, it says so instead of quietly printing n.d. If you leave out the journal name, it says the entry is not finished. I would rather the tool be annoying about it than hand you a reference that looks complete but loses marks.

How the styles differ

This is the part worth understanding, because it explains why you cannot just copy a reference from one style into another.

APA 7th is the psychology, education, and social science default. It uses sentence case for titles, so only the first word and proper nouns are capitalised. It uses an ampersand inside parentheses, two authors joined that way, and “et al.” from three authors in the in-text citation. Dates sit right after the author, in parentheses. It dropped the publisher city in the 7th edition, so you do not need it for APA — I keep the city field because MLA and Chicago still want it.

MLA 9th uses title case for titles, quotation marks around shorter works like articles and webpages, and italics for longer ones like books. The date goes at the end of the entry, and the in-text citation usually has no year at all — just the author and a page number. MLA wants the access date for web sources, which is why I never fill one in automatically. If your instructor wants one, type the date you actually looked at the page.

Chicago 17th has two whole systems, notes-bibliography and author-date. I built the author-date version, because that is the one most people mean when they say Chicago in a social science or business course. If you are in history, religion, or philosophy, your instructor probably wants footnotes, and you should use a footnote-aware tool instead.

Harvard is the style used in a lot of UK, Australian, and New Zealand business and social science degrees. It is APA-adjacent: the year goes in parentheses after the author, and there are three authors or more in the in-text citation it drops to the first name and et al.

How to use it without messing up

  1. Look at your assignment sheet or syllabus first. It usually names the style. If it says “any style,” ask which one, because there is no safe default.
  2. Pick the style and the source type. The right fields appear, so you are not typing a city into a field meant for a journal.
  3. Fill in the author last name and first name. Leave the first name blank if the author is a group, like a university or a government department, and it will treat the last field as the whole name.
  4. Add more authors with Add Author. Two authors get joined properly. Three or more get the et al. treatment in the in-text citation.
  5. Type the year. Add the month and day only if you have them. Every field is optional except the author and the title.
  6. For a journal article, paste the DOI however you have it. If you paste doi:10.1109/5.579923, it comes out as https://doi.org/10.1109/5.579923. Same for a URL — type it with or without https:// and it is normalised.
  7. Hit Format Citation, read both lines, then copy.

Three things it will not decide for you

Proper nouns in sentence case. APA lowercases titles except for the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns. A script cannot reliably tell that “Canada” is a proper noun and “attention” is not, so it leaves all-caps words and words with internal capitals alone and lowercases the rest. Read the title and fix anything that got flattened. McGill, iPhone, and NASA stay; Everything else depends on the word.

Whether a source has a date. If a webpage has no date anywhere, n.d. is honest. If a date is buried in the footer and you just skipped it, n.d. is lazy. I check those by opening the page and looking for it.

Long author lists. The tool follows the common rules — up to twenty authors listed, et al. in the in-text citation from three. Some departments want all twenty-one or more listed with an ellipsis, and some want everyone. Check.

Worked example: a journal article in APA

Here is what I would type for a paper:

  • Last name: Vaswani. First name: Ashish.
  • Another author: Shazeer, Noam. And: Parmar, Niki.
  • Title: Attention is all you need
  • Journal: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
  • Year: 2017

The reference entry comes out as: Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., & Parmar, N. (2017). Attention is all you need. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.

The in-text citation is (Vaswani et al., 2017) — three or more authors, so et al. takes over. With two authors you would get (Smith & Lee, 2017). With one author, (Vaswani, 2017).

Why a generator, and not the library tool

Most university libraries have a citation tool, and honestly, if your library has one you should use it — it pulls the metadata directly from the record, so the volume and issue numbers are right without you typing them. I use one every time.

The point of this one is the opposite situation. You are writing a paper at 1 a.m., the library tool is giving you a 403, or you are citing a lecture recording or a blog post that no database has indexed. Then a form that takes what you already know is faster and it still gets the punctuation right.

Either way, open the source after you cite it. I have cited a paper from memory that turned out to be a different paper with a similar title. It took twenty minutes to fix and about ten seconds to avoid.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this generator free, and do you store what I type?

Yes, and no. Every tool on this site runs in your browser, there is no account, and your source details are not sent anywhere. The only thing saved on your own device is your last style and source-type choice, so the dropdown is where you left it next time. Clearing your browser storage removes that.

Which style should I use if my professor did not say?

Ask, in writing, before you submit. The style depends on the department, not the subject in the abstract, and two professors in the same department can want different things. If you have to guess: APA for psychology, education, and most social sciences, MLA for English and the humanities, Chicago for history. Guessing costs you one email and saves a mark.

What is n.d. and when do I use it?

n.d. means no date. It is correct when the source genuinely has no publication or revision date — an undated blog post, a page with no date anywhere. It is wrong when you did not look. The tool never invents a date, so if you see n.d., go and check the source page for a date first.

How many authors do I list in a reference list?

In APA 7, list up to twenty authors in the reference list, and use et al. from three authors in the in-text citation. MLA lists one author, two authors, then et al. for three or more. Chicago bibliography lists up to ten. The generator applies those rules for you, so add every author your source lists and let the tool decide how to print them.

Does it work for sources from a paywalled journal or a book I only have as an ebook?

Yes. It never fetches anything, so a paywall does not matter. It formats from the details you type, which is exactly what you need when you read a paper through your library proxy or borrowed a book on Kindle. Just make sure the year, the volume, and the page range come from the record, not from the preview page.

Other tools

Cite the source, not the tool. And once you have formatted everything, open one entry and check it against the actual page. Ten seconds of checking saves a bad mark.

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