Free citation generator

A reference list is where small mistakes cost easy marks

Most people don't lose marks because they can't cite — they lose them because a comma sits where a period should, an author's initials are spelled out, or a title is in quotes when the style wanted italics. Reference formatting is fiddly by design, and each style draws those lines differently. This generator takes the source details you already have and arranges them into the exact shape one of six styles expects, so you can spend your attention on the writing instead of the punctuation.

It's deliberately narrow. Type the author, title, year and source for a website or a book, choose APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE or Vancouver, and copy the finished line. There's no project to set up and nothing to log into — useful when you're three sources deep at midnight and just need the entry to come out right the first time.

How the generator assembles each entry

Every style is really a recipe: a fixed order of elements, a set of separators between them, and rules for what gets italicised, quoted or abbreviated. When you pick a tab, the tool applies that recipe to the same set of fields. APA leads with the author and a parenthetical year and italicises the title; MLA puts the title in quotes and the container in italics with an "Accessed" date at the end; IEEE numbers the entry and reduces first names to initials; Vancouver strips the periods out of those initials entirely. You enter the facts once, and switching tabs re-renders them — nothing is re-typed.

It also handles the small joins people forget. Multiple authors are split on the semicolons you type and rejoined with the right connector for the style — an ampersand for APA, "and" for MLA, a trailing "et al." once the list grows long. A blank year becomes "n.d." rather than an empty bracket. The whole thing runs in your browser as you type, which is why the preview updates instantly and why none of your source details are uploaded or stored anywhere.

Not sure which of the six to use?

Usually the choice isn't yours — your department, journal or assignment brief names a style, and that's the one to use. If you genuinely have a free hand, the discipline is the best guide:

• APA — psychology, education, nursing and most social sciences. Author–date, year up front, designed for citing recent research.
• MLA — English, languages, literature and the humanities. Author–page, with a focus on the work being quoted.
• Chicago — history and the arts; common in book publishing. The notes-and-bibliography form used here pairs footnotes with a full reference list.
• Harvard — a widespread author–date convention across UK and Commonwealth universities; close to APA but with its own punctuation.
• IEEE — engineering, computer science and technical writing. Numbered references that match bracketed callouts in the text.
• Vancouver — medicine and the life sciences. Numbered, terse, and built for dense reference lists.

If you're switching disciplines mid-degree, the same source can sit comfortably in any of these — flip between the tabs to see the same details reformatted before you commit.

Entering details so the citation comes out right

The output is only ever as good as what you feed it, and a few habits make every entry land cleanly. Type each author as Last, First and separate multiple authors with a semicolon — for example, Smith, John; Doe, Jane. That single convention is what lets the generator decide who comes first, how to abbreviate, and when to fold the rest into "et al."

A handful of small things to watch: choose Website or Book first, since that decides whether the title is quoted or italicised and whether the URL and access-date fields apply. For a web source, MLA and Harvard like an access date while APA generally doesn't need one for a stable page — leave it blank if it isn't required. Put the publisher or website in the source field, not the URL, and paste the full link rather than a shortened one. If a page has no date, just leave the year empty and it will read "n.d." correctly. When you're done, the Copy button keeps the hanging indent so the entry drops straight into your reference list.

What it covers — and what to verify yourself

This tool is built for the two source types that make up the bulk of most reference lists: websites and books. For those, it follows the core formatting rules of each style and gets the common cases right. It's a fast way to get the structure correct, not a replacement for the official style manuals — and it deliberately doesn't try to be one.

So a few sources need a human eye. Journal articles with volume, issue and page ranges, edited chapters, conference papers, theses, government reports and anything with a DOI carry extra elements these two forms don't capture. Style guides also update — APA is on its 7th edition, MLA on its 9th — and your institution may use a house variant with its own quirks. Treat the result as a clean, correctly ordered first draft, then check anything unusual against your assignment brief or style guide before you submit. For straightforward web pages and books, what you copy is usually ready to paste as-is.