How to use the citation generator
- Choose the citation style and what you're citing: a website, book, journal article, YouTube video or report.
- For an article or book, paste its DOI or ISBN and press Look up. Otherwise fill in the authors, title and date.
- Check the result, especially names and capital letters, then Copy it into your document. Copy keeps the italics in Word and Google Docs; Copy as plain text doesn't.
- Press Add to references for each source. The list is sorted A to Z and switches style when you do.
One article in five styles
Here is the same journal article, the Chicago Manual of Style's own example, as the generator formats it in each style, with an in-text citation for page 1842:
| Style | Reference entry and in-text citation |
|---|---|
| APA 7 | Kwon, H. (2022). Inclusion work: Children of immigrants claiming membership in everyday life. American Journal of Sociology, 127(6), 1818–1859. https://doi.org/10.1086/720277 In text: (Kwon, 2022, p. 1842) |
| MLA 9 | Kwon, Hyeyoung. “Inclusion Work: Children of Immigrants Claiming Membership in Everyday Life.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 127, no. 6, 2022, pp. 1818-59, https://doi.org/10.1086/720277. In text: (Kwon 1842) |
| Chicago (notes) | Kwon, Hyeyoung. “Inclusion Work: Children of Immigrants Claiming Membership in Everyday Life.” American Journal of Sociology 127, no. 6 (2022): 1818–59. https://doi.org/10.1086/720277. Footnote: Hyeyoung Kwon, “Inclusion Work: Children of Immigrants Claiming Membership in Everyday Life,” American Journal of Sociology 127, no. 6 (2022): 1842, https://doi.org/10.1086/720277. |
| Chicago (author-date) | Kwon, Hyeyoung. 2022. “Inclusion Work: Children of Immigrants Claiming Membership in Everyday Life.” American Journal of Sociology 127 (6): 1818–59. https://doi.org/10.1086/720277. In text: (Kwon 2022, 1842) |
| Harvard | Kwon, H. (2022) ‘Inclusion work: Children of immigrants claiming membership in everyday life’, American Journal of Sociology, 127(6), pp. 1818–1859. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1086/720277 In text: (Kwon, 2022, p. 1842) |
Notice what changes: where the year goes, sentence case or title case, single or double quotation marks, “vol.” and “pp.” in MLA, and shortened page ranges (1818–59) in Chicago and MLA.
What each style expects
- APA 7th edition: author and year in brackets, initials instead of first names, & before the last author, sentence-case titles, and the DOI as a link. Up to 20 authors are listed.
- MLA 9th edition: full first names, title case, titles of parts in quotation marks and their containers in italics, “et al.” for three or more authors, and the page number alone in the text, as in (Kwon 1842).
- Chicago 17th edition: either footnotes with a bibliography, or author-date citations with a reference list. Books include the city of publication.
- Harvard: there's no single official Harvard style. This tool follows Cite Them Right (13th edition, 2025), which many UK universities use: sentence case, “Available at:” for links and the date you accessed web pages. If your university has its own Harvard guide, check its small differences.
Check before you hand it in
- Make sure names are spelled and capitalised as on the source, and that a looked-up record has the right authors.
- Reference lists use a hanging indent (every line after the first is indented). Copy keeps it; in Word you can also set it under Paragraph > Indentation > Special > Hanging.
- Keep a note of each source as you read, with its page numbers, so you don't have to find it again later.
- Need a word count or a place to draft? Try the word counter.
Rules checked on 2 October 2026 against the APA and MLA examples on the Purdue OWL, the Chicago Manual of Style citation guide and the Cite Them Right 13th edition as summarised by UK university libraries. Look-ups use the free Crossref API and Open Library Books API. Always follow your instructor's guidance where it differs.