Paste your source URL, pick a style, and get a properly formatted citation in seconds. Works for websites, books, journal articles, YouTube videos, and more. No signup, no paywall, no ads.
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Paste your source. Drop in a URL, DOI, ISBN, or book title.
Pick a style. APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, or one of 1,000+ others.
Let the tool format it. You get both the full reference and the in-text citation.
Copy or export. Copy it straight into your paper, or export the whole list to Word.
Yes. Paste a source, pick a style, copy the citation. No account required for basic use.
No account is needed to generate individual citations. An account lets you save reference lists and come back to them later.
APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 17, Harvard, Turabian, IEEE, Oxford, AMA, ASA, and around a thousand more through CSL.
The tool runs on the same CSL engine that Zotero and Mendeley use. It’s as accurate as the metadata on the source page. Always do a quick scan of each output before submitting, especially for author names and publication dates.
A citation is the short marker inside your paper, like (Smith, 2020). A reference is the full entry at the end of the paper, with title, publisher, and date. A bibliography lists everything you read for the project. A reference list only includes what you actually cited.
If you’re writing from scratch, our AI essay writer can help you build a well-structured draft where citations and references are placed correctly from the start.
Use the organization name, or the page title if there’s no organization either. Our tool picks the right fallback automatically based on the style you chose.
APA treats AI output like a software citation: OpenAI as the author, the year, the model name, and the URL. Confirm your instructor allows AI citations first, because some courses don’t.
Two authors: list both. Three or more: list the first author followed by "et al." The reference generator applies the correct rule for your chosen style.
Usually yes. Incorrect formatting costs style marks in most courses, and missing citations for paraphrased material can trigger plagiarism checks. Using a consistent tool across your whole paper prevents both problems.
You can cite anything you’ve actually referenced. Use the preview page, the abstract, or the database record for the metadata. Don’t cite a source you haven’t read, regardless of what’s available.
Every source you use in a paper needs a citation. Proper formatting gives credit to the original author, keeps your work free of plagiarism, and shows your arguments are backed by real research. Whether you’re using our essay writing service or writing on your own, proper formatting ensures clarity and professionalism.
The catch is that different subjects use different citation styles, and the one your professor expects depends on your field. Here’s how to tell them apart.
Our reference generator supports all of these plus roughly a thousand other styles, including subject-specific ones like AMA (medicine), ASA (sociology), and APSA (political science).
Every citation goes through the same four stages, from source lookup to final output.
When you paste a URL, DOI, or ISBN, the tool fetches the source’s metadata from the relevant database. DOIs resolve through CrossRef, which indexes over 140 million scholarly records directly from publishers. ISBNs resolve through WorldCat and Google Books, covering roughly 500 million books and media items. URLs are parsed from the page’s HTML head and Open Graph tags.
Raw metadata gets normalized before formatting. Author names appear in many formats (Smith, John / J. Smith / John Smith), dates come through inconsistently, and titles often include the site name appended. The tool standardizes all of it into one clean record.
The cleaned record is then passed to a CSL (Citation Style Language) processor. CSL is the open standard that Zotero, Mendeley, and most professional reference managers run on. Each citation style (APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 17, Harvard, and the rest) exists as a separate CSL file maintained by the style’s official body or the CSL community. When APA or MLA update their guidelines, the CSL file updates, and the tool reflects the change automatically.
The processor builds both the in-text citation and the full reference entry at the same time, using the same CSL file. That’s why the parenthetical (Smith, 2020) always matches the reference list entry. They come from one source of truth, not two separate formatting passes.
The whole pipeline runs in under a second, and every step uses the same standards professional researchers rely on.
If your assignment brief names a style, use that one. That’s the only rule that matters.
If it doesn’t, follow your subject. Social sciences default to APA. Humanities default to MLA. History defaults to Chicago. UK programs often default to Harvard. If you’re still stuck, email your instructor before you start writing. Switching styles halfway through a paper is worse than asking a two-line question.
Need more than just citations? Get expert help with your full assignment. Explore our essay writing services by type for any essay format your professor requires. Or browse our writing services by document type for help with lab reports, case studies, research papers, and more.
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