Citation Generator

How to use

1. Choose the source type. Book, journal article or website page. The fields stay the same, but each style uses them differently — a journal name, volume and issue only matter for journal articles.
2. Enter the authors, one per line. Write “First Last”, or “Last, First” if that is how you copied the name. The tool inverts names, adds initials or “et al.”, and shortens long author lists exactly as each style directs (see the author rules below).
3. Enter the title and the remaining details. The title is required. Leave the year blank when the source gives no date, and leave the author box blank when the source names no author — both cases are handled, not rejected.
4. Generate, then copy or download each style separately. Copy gives plain text for pasting into a document; Download saves the same plain text as a .txt file. Reapply italics in your document, since plain text cannot carry them.

Worked example

Load sample fills the form with a fictional book: three fictional authors (Lena Harper, Tomas Rivera and Aisha Khan), the year 2024, the fictional title “The Quiet Garden: A Fictional Field Guide to Small Green Spaces”, and the fictional publisher Riverstone Press. The three outputs show why the styles differ. APA lists all three authors with initials and an ampersand before the last name, and sentence-cases the title. MLA lists only the first author followed by “et al.” and keeps the title as typed. Chicago author-date lists all three authors in full, with the year standing on its own after the names. The in-text forms differ too: APA gives “(Harper et al., 2024)”, MLA gives “(Harper et al.)” with no year, and Chicago gives “(Harper, Rivera, and Khan 2024)” — three authors are all named in a Chicago in-text citation, while four or more would shorten to “et al.”

Limitations

This tool formats one reference at a time from the details you enter; it does not look sources up, check that a DOI resolves, or verify that the details you typed match the source. It covers books, journal articles and website pages only — chapters, edited volumes, reports, theses, videos and other source types are out of scope, and their rules differ. It does not collect a place of publication, so if your institution still requires one for Chicago books, add it before the publisher yourself. It does not collect a month, day or access date, so for a web page that changes over time, add an access date if your institution asks for one. APA titles are sentence-cased automatically, which can wrongly lowercase a proper noun you typed in capitals — check capitalisation in the APA output before you submit. Always check a generated citation against your institution's required style before submitting — the tool formats, it does not guarantee acceptance.

Author and date rules applied here

• APA, 7th edition: reference list — up to 20 authors are all listed; for 21 or more, the first 19 are listed, then an ellipsis, then the last author. In-text, 3 or more authors shorten to the first surname plus “et al.” from the first citation. No date is shown as “(n.d.)”.
• MLA, 9th edition: Works Cited — 1 or 2 authors are all listed; 3 or more are shortened to the first author plus “et al.”. No date is simply left out; MLA does not use “n.d.” in a Works Cited entry.
• Chicago, 17th edition, author-date: reference list — up to 10 authors are all listed; for 11 or more, the first 7 are listed, then “et al.”. In-text, 1 to 3 authors are all named and 4 or more shorten to “et al.”. No date is shown as “n.d.”.
• Missing author, all three styles: the title moves to the author position, and the entry is filed under the title.

Frequently asked questions

Related tools

• Content Analyzer — check a passage of writing before you cite from it.
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• Text Compare — compare two versions of a passage side by side.