Citation Generator

The Citation Generator builds correctly formatted references in four of the most widely required academic styles: APA (7th edition), MLA (9th edition), Chicago (author-date and notes-bibliography), and Harvard. You enter the source details — author names, title, publication year, publisher, journal name, volume and issue, page range, URL, and access date — and the tool assembles the reference with the punctuation, italics, capitalization, and ordering each style demands.

It is aimed at students, researchers, and writers who need to produce a bibliography, works-cited list, or reference list without memorizing the fine rules of each style guide. It handles common source types such as books, journal articles, websites, and edited chapters, and runs entirely in your browser so nothing has to be uploaded or installed.

Each style has a distinct signature. APA 7th places the year in parentheses right after the author and uses sentence case for article titles, for example: Smith, J. (2020). The title of the work. Publisher. MLA 9th puts the full author name first, the title in title case and quotation marks or italics, and ends with the publication medium and date, following the container model. Chicago offers two systems — author-date (similar in spirit to APA) and notes-bibliography, which uses numbered footnotes plus a bibliography. Harvard is an author-date family whose exact punctuation varies by institution, typically rendering as Smith, J. (2020) Title of work. Place: Publisher.

The tool applies the ordering, italics, and punctuation rules for the chosen style automatically. It also handles multi-author formatting: APA uses an ampersand before the final author and abbreviates to et al. for three or more in-text, while MLA writes and et al. differently. Because it runs on your device, the formatting logic is applied instantly with no round trip to a server, and your source data never leaves the browser.