Free Citation Generator

Which citation style do you need?

Most courses specify a style in the assignment brief or the module handbook. If yours doesn't, the convention usually follows the discipline. These are the four styles this generator supports and where each one is normally used.

Harvard is the one to watch. It is not a single published standard the way APA and MLA are — it is a family of closely related conventions, and individual universities publish their own variants. This generator follows the widely used Cite Them Right conventions. If your department issues its own Harvard guide, check the output against it, particularly for punctuation around the year.

Ten kinds of source, not three

Most free generators handle books, journal articles and web pages, and quietly force everything else into one of those three. That is where wrong references come from: a chapter in an edited collection filed as a book loses its editors and its page range, and a thesis filed as a book loses the degree and the awarding university — both of which every style requires. Pick the source type at the top of the form and only the fields that type actually needs appear.

Importing from Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote or Google Scholar

If you have already collected sources somewhere else, you do not have to retype them. Open Import from a reference manager under your bibliography and either choose a .ris or .bib file or paste the text straight in. Google Scholar's "Cite" link offers both formats as a block of text you can copy; every major reference manager and most university library catalogues export at least one.

Two formats cover almost everything. RIS is a tagged line format — TY  - JOUR opens a record and ER  - closes it — designed for Research Information Systems' reference software and now the common export currency. BibTeX, published by Oren Patashnik in 1985 for use with LaTeX, wraps each entry in @article{key, ...}. You do not have to know which you have: the format is detected from the content, so a file with the wrong extension, or text pasted with no extension at all, still imports.

Three things this import does that matter more than they sound:

• It adds, never replaces. Imported sources join whatever is already in your bibliography. Nothing you have built up is overwritten by a bad file.
• It reports every record it could not read. A record with no title, or with a type the format does not define, is listed with its line number rather than dropped in silence — so an import of 40 sources that yields 38 tells you which two are missing and why.
• It reads the file in your browser. The file is never uploaded, so importing an unpublished reading list does not put it on anyone's server.

Export works the same way in reverse. Alongside plain text, the bibliography downloads as .ris and .bib, so you can move your list into a reference manager, into LaTeX, or on to a co-author.

Looking up a DOI or an ISBN — and what that sends

Typing out a nineteen-word article title is nobody's idea of study time. Put a DOI or an ISBN in the Look up box and press the button: the DOI goes to Crossref, the ISBN to OpenLibrary, and the fields come back filled in for you to check.

This is the one part of the tool that talks to anything outside your browser, so it is worth being precise:

• It only runs when you press the button. Not while you type, not when you paste, not when a field loses focus. If you never press it, nothing is ever sent.
• Only the identifier is sent. The DOI or the ISBN, and nothing else — not your title, your authors, your notes or your saved list. Crossref also receives this site's contact address, because its API asks callers to identify themselves; it is never yours.
• You can undo it. A filled-in form can be put back exactly as it was with one press, and every field stays editable either way.
• A failed lookup changes nothing. If the identifier is wrong, the service is down, or you are offline, you get a sentence saying which of those it was and everything you had already typed is left untouched.

There is deliberately no "paste a URL and we'll figure it out" button. Every service that turns an arbitrary web address into citation metadata either wants an API key or requires the page to be fetched by a server rather than by your browser — and that would mean your reading history passing through someone else's machine. Web pages are typed in by hand here, which takes about thirty seconds and costs nothing.

Two honest caveats on the lookup itself. Crossref is excellent for journal articles and increasingly good for chapters, reports and data sets, but it only knows about works whose publisher registered a DOI. OpenLibrary is strongest on English-language trade books; textbooks, non-English editions and very recent printings are often missing or incomplete. Neither is a reason not to use them, but both are a reason to read what comes back before you save it — catalogue records get capitalisation wrong more often than they get facts wrong.

Annotated bibliographies

An annotated bibliography is a reference list where each entry is followed by a short paragraph — usually 100 to 200 words — summarising the source and saying what it contributes to your argument. It is a common first assessment in research-methods and dissertation modules, precisely because it is hard to fake.

Add a note to any saved source with the Note button beside it, then tick Show as an annotated bibliography. Each note is set as an indented block beneath its reference, which is what all four styles ask for: APA 7 (§9.51), Chicago 17 (§14.64) and Cite Them Right all indent the annotation half an inch past the hanging indent, while MLA 9 (§5.132) uses a full inch. It looks like this:

Notes are saved with the rest of your bibliography, travel with the .txt download, and survive a round trip through .ris and .bib — RIS carries them in the N1 note tag, BibTeX in note. They never appear in the in-text citation, because an annotated bibliography still cites parenthetically in the body of the essay.

The four mistakes that cost the most marks

1. Getting the author count rules wrong

Every style truncates long author lists, but at a different point and in a different way. APA 7 lists up to 20 authors in the reference list and only shortens to "et al." in the in-text citation from three authors onward. MLA 9 shortens in the reference list itself from three authors. Harvard shortens from four. Chicago lists up to ten. Getting this wrong is one of the most common deductions, and it is entirely mechanical — which is exactly why a generator should handle it.

2. Capitalising titles the wrong way

APA uses sentence case: only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns are capitalised. MLA and Chicago use title case, where principal words are capitalised but short prepositions and articles are not. A title copied from a journal site — or from a DOI lookup — is usually title case, which is wrong for APA. This tool converts automatically, keeping acronyms like DNA, initials and genus names such as E. coli, and the first word after a colon.

One honest limit. Nothing tells a machine that Google is a proper noun and Rise is not, so an unusual surname will be lowered. Glance at the APA output before pasting it.

3. Missing the retrieval information for online sources

If a source has a DOI, use it — a DOI is permanent and always preferred over a URL. APA 7 formats it as a full https://doi.org/ link rather than the old "doi:" prefix. Harvard still uses the doi: form. For web pages without a DOI, Harvard and MLA want an access date; APA only wants one if the content is likely to change without notice.

4. Using "n.d." incorrectly

When no publication date is available, all four styles use "n.d." (no date) — but only after you have genuinely looked. Check the page footer, the article metadata, and the copyright line before giving up. An undated source is also a signal worth pausing on: if you cannot establish when something was published, consider whether it is a source you should be citing at all.

How to build a reference list

1. Collect as you go. Add each source the moment you use it. Reconstructing a bibliography the night before a deadline is where errors and accidental plagiarism creep in.
2. Alphabetise by the leading element — normally the first author's surname, or the organisation, or the title if there is no author. This tool sorts your list automatically, ignoring a leading "The", "A" or "An".
3. Use a hanging indent. The first line sits flush left and subsequent lines indent. The preview above shows this formatting, and it carries across when you paste into a word processor.
4. Check every in-text citation has a matching reference, and vice versa. Orphans in either direction are a routine deduction.
5. Count the words after you have finished referencing. Most departments exclude the reference list from the limit, but not all do — the character and word counter will tell you both figures in a second.

A worked example: a dissertation literature review

Say you are three weeks into a final-year project with about forty sources. Export whatever you already have from your library account or Zotero as a .ris file and import it in one go. Add the rest as you read them, using the DOI lookup for anything with one. Put a two-sentence note on each source the day you read it — future you will not remember why a paper mattered.

When the review is drafted, switch the style to whatever your department asks for; every entry re-renders instantly, so choosing Harvard over APA in week eleven costs nothing. Download the .txt for the document and the .bib as a backup. Then run the draft through the readability checker to find the sentences that grew to forty words while you were concentrating on the citations.

Why this generator is free

The well-known citation tools were free once. Several were acquired and then moved export, extra styles, or ad-free use behind a subscription, which leaves students paying for something that is fundamentally a formatting task.

There is no paid tier here. Every style, every source type, unlimited citations, import and export are free, and there is no account to create. Your bibliography is stored in your own browser using local storage, so it survives closing the tab but never reaches a server. Clearing your browser data clears it, so download a copy if you need one. The rest of the study tools here work the same way.

Always check the output

No generator, this one included, is a substitute for the style manual. Automatic tools handle the mechanical rules reliably but cannot always tell an edited collection from a monograph, or spot that a "journal article" is really a preprint. Skim the generated reference against the source before you submit, and check anything unusual — translated works, government reports, archival material — against your university's guide. If you are budgeting your revision time around the assignment, the final grade calculator will tell you how much this piece is actually worth.