Citation generator for APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and IEEE

Paste a DOI, a URL, or the details of a book or article, pick your style, and get the reference and the matching in-text citation. Unlimited and free, because this tool runs on citation rules, not AI, so it costs us nearly nothing and gets your formatting exactly right.

How this citation generator works

Citation formatting is a rules problem, not a judgment problem. This generator uses the Citation Style Language, the same open standard behind Zotero and thousands of journals, so the output follows the official rules of each style: APA 7th edition, MLA 9th, Chicago 17th (author-date and notes), Harvard, and IEEE.

When you paste a DOI, the generator looks the work up in Crossref, the registry where publishers deposit their metadata, and builds the citation from the publisher’s own record. That matters because it means the citation describes a real, findable source. AI chatbots are notorious for inventing plausible-looking references to papers that don’t exist; a generator that starts from a verified identifier can’t do that.

Worked example

Paste 10.1177/0149206320986 and select APA 7. You get:

Reference list entry: Kim, S., & Lee, J. (2022). Pricing under platform competition: Evidence from direct-to-consumer retail. Journal of Management, 48(3), 611-639. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206320986

In-text: (Kim & Lee, 2022), or Kim and Lee (2022) when the authors are part of your sentence.

Switch the style dropdown to MLA or IEEE and the same source reformats instantly.

The errors this catches for you

Hand-formatted references usually fail on the small things markers notice first: italics in the wrong place, “and” versus “&”, sentence case versus title case, missing DOIs, wrong ampersand rules for three or more authors, and hanging indents. The generator applies each style’s actual rules so those points stop leaking marks.

When not to use it

If your course requires a specific referencing variant (many universities publish their own Harvard variant, and law courses use OSCOLA or Bluebook), check the output against your course guide. Harvard especially has no single official version; ours follows the widely used Cite Them Right conventions.