Citation Generator

Who uses a citation generator

Anyone handing in work that names its sources, in the style someone else chose.

• Essays and assignments

  A reference list in APA, a works cited page in MLA, or footnotes in Chicago, as the course handbook asks.

• Dissertations and theses

  A long list built over months, kept in one style and switched if the department changes its mind.

• Lab reports

  Journal articles with DOIs in APA, with the in-text citation for each.

• Research papers

  Many-author articles, where et al. falls at a different number in every style.

• Teaching citation

  The parts of an entry, and the rule behind each, set out for a class.

• Blog posts and reports

  Sources for a report or an article, cited consistently without an account.

• Checking a generator

  A reference from another tool rebuilt here to see which rule it broke.

• Videos as sources

  YouTube lectures and talks, cited with their channel, date and running time.

What each part of a citation follows, in APA, MLA and Chicago

Every citation generator turns the same few facts, who wrote it, when, what it is called and where it was published, into an entry. None of the ones in the search results says which rule put each part where it is, and that is exactly what a marker checks. This one prints, under every entry, a table of its parts and the rule each follows. Here are the rules for all three styles side by side:

Where the numbers come from. APA numbers are sections of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition (2020). Chicago numbers are paragraphs of The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition (2024), as university library guides give them for the changes from the 17th. MLA rules are those of the MLA Handbook, 9th edition (2021), which builds every entry from the same list of core elements: author, title, container, other contributors, version, number, publisher, date and location. Where a rule has no number here, the tool still follows it; the number was not checked against the manual, so it is not printed.

Which style to use is your teacher’s or publisher’s choice, not yours: APA is usual in psychology, education, nursing and the social sciences, MLA in English and the humanities, and Chicago notes and bibliography in history and the arts. If you are told only “Chicago”, ask whether the notes style or the author-date style is meant; this tool does notes and bibliography.

Sentence case and title case: why generators get titles wrong

Titles are where citation generators go wrong most often, and the reason is simple. APA wants a title in sentence case: a capital on the first word, on the first word after a colon, and on names, and small letters everywhere else. A journal prints Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk; APA wants Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Lowering the words is easy. Knowing which capitals belong to names is not: no program can tell from the letters that London or Darwin must stay up and Street must come down.

Generators that look a source up either keep the capitals the database gave them, which is wrong for APA, or lower everything, which is wrong for names. This tool lowers what sentence case lowers and lists every word it lowered as a button above the checks. Tap a name and it keeps its capital in this entry and in any other title where it appears. Acronyms such as NASA and words with a capital inside them, such as iPhone or McDonald, are never lowered, and neither is I.

Title case in MLA and Chicago capitalizes every main word and lowers, unless it is the first or last word or follows a colon: the articles a, an and the; prepositions such as of, in, on, under, between and through, however long; to and as; and the conjunctions and, but, for, nor and or. MLA also lowers so and yet; Chicago capitalizes them. Each part of a hyphenated word is treated as a word, so 21st-century reader becomes 21st-Century Reader. A word you typed with a capital inside it is kept as typed.

Words that are sometimes prepositions, such as after, before, since, until, up, over and around, are capitalized, because in titles they are as often conjunctions or adverbs (After We Left, Giving Up), and a program cannot tell which. If one is a preposition in your title (Life after Death), lower it by hand after copying. A title typed all in capitals is first put in small letters, and the tool says so, because its acronyms then need checking.

Page ranges: 263–291, 263-91 or 263–91

A page range looks trivial and is printed three different ways. APA gives both numbers in full with an en dash (–, longer than a hyphen). MLA uses a hyphen and gives only the last two digits of the second number when that is enough to be clear. Chicago uses an en dash and its own system for shortening, which depends on where the first number falls in its hundred. Type the pages as you see them, with any dash or hyphen, and the tool writes them the style’s way:

Chicago’s rule in full: a first number under 100, or a multiple of 100, is followed by the second in full (96–117, 100–104); after 101 to 109 in a hundred, only the digits that change (101–8); after 110 to 199 in a hundred, two digits or more as needed (321–28, 498–532); and with four-digit numbers where three digits change, both in full (1496–1504). Pages that are not plain numbers, such as S12-S19 or xii-xv, keep their form with the dash changed. In MLA a single page is p. 45, a range pp. 45-52.

Pages or an article number. Many online journals give each article a number instead of pages, such as e0123456. Type it in Article number and the pages box is ignored: APA prints Article e0123456.

What this citation generator does not do

Names with Jr. or III, names written family name first such as many Chinese, Japanese and Korean names, and titles in languages other than English all have rules of their own in each manual; type the name as it should appear and check the entry against your style guide. A list made here still needs a hanging indent: in Word, select it and set Special: Hanging under Paragraph. To check that the finished essay, without its references, is within a word limit, use the word counter.

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