Citation Generator

About the Citation Generator

Reference styles are a solved problem that remains annoying because the solution is fiddly rather than difficult. Each style has firm rules about the order of elements, which parts are italicised, how names are inverted, how many authors before et al., and how a missing date is marked — and every one of those rules differs between styles in a way no one memorises.

Paste whatever details you have and this page formats them. Six styles are covered: APA seventh edition, MLA ninth, Chicago's notes and bibliography, Harvard, IEEE and Vancouver. The details can arrive in any order and in any shape. It works out the source type from what you give it — journal article, book, chapter, web page, report, thesis, video, dataset — and applies that type's rules, which is where most of the fiddliness lives.

There is one thing it will not do, and it is the reason to prefer it to a chattier alternative: it will not invent an element. Not a year, not a publisher, not a volume number, not a DOI, not a place of publication. This is the specific and serious failure of using a general-purpose assistant for references — asked for a citation it will produce a beautifully formatted one containing a page range that does not exist, and the formatting is what makes it convincing. Where an element is missing here, the style's own convention for a missing element is used, and the list at the end tells you exactly which details you still need to find.

It also cannot open a URL or look a work up. Give it a bare link and it can only format the link. Give it the title, author, publication and date from that page and it can produce a real reference.

The in-text citation comes with it, in both the parenthetical and narrative forms, since those differ and getting them the wrong way round is the most visible mistake in an otherwise correct bibliography.

How to use it

1. 1Paste every detail you have: title, author, publication, year, publisher, URL, DOI, pages — order does not matter.
2. 2Pick the style your department, journal or publisher requires.
3. 3Keep the in-text citation on so you have both the parenthetical and narrative forms.
4. 4Read the MISSING list and go and find those details rather than leaving them out.
5. 5Check the result against your style guide's own example for that source type.

Questions

Can it look up a paper from a DOI or a URL?

No. It has no access to the internet and cannot open a link. Give it a bare URL and all it can do is format that URL. Copy the title, authors, journal and year from the page first, and it will produce a proper reference from them.

Will it make up a page number or a publisher?

It is instructed not to, in the strongest terms available, because that is precisely what a general chat assistant will do when asked for a citation. A missing element gets the style's own marker for a missing element and appears in the list of what you still need to find.

Which edition of each style does it use?

APA seventh, MLA ninth and Chicago seventeenth, which are the current editions at the time of writing. Harvard is not a single standard at all — institutions publish their own variants — so check the result against your own institution's guide, since differences there are normal rather than errors.

Can I do a whole bibliography at once?

One source per run works best, since the details of several sources pasted together tend to get attributed to the wrong one. Four thousand characters is the limit in any case, and a reference is short — running it once per source takes moments and gives you a chance to check each.