Citation Generator

You're three days out from a paper deadline, you've got 14 sources, and the formatting requirements are APA 7th edition with hanging indents. Doing each citation by hand from a style guide is painful and produces wildly inconsistent output across a long bibliography — the kind of inconsistency a grader spots immediately.

Fill in the basics for each source — author, year, title, publication or URL — pick APA or MLA, and you'll get a properly formatted citation. The generator handles books, journal articles, and websites, which covers the majority of undergraduate sources. It doesn't handle every edge case (interview transcripts, government documents with weird author conventions, conference proceedings) — for those, the official style manuals or a paid reference manager will serve you better.

The formatting rules: APA 7th edition (published 2019, the current standard) uses author-date in-text and a reference list with hanging indents. Authors are listed by last name, first initial only. Up to 20 authors get listed; beyond that, ellipsis and the last author. Titles use sentence case for articles and books (only the first word and proper nouns capitalized) but title case for journal names. URLs and DOIs go at the end with no "Retrieved from" prefix anymore. MLA 9th edition uses author-page in-text and a Works Cited list. Authors are listed first-name-first after the first author. Titles use title case throughout. The container concept (the larger work containing your source) is more prominent than in earlier editions.

A worked example: a journal article with one author, Smith, J., published 2024, titled "Reading patterns in adults," in the Journal of Cognitive Studies, volume 12, issue 3, pages 45-62, DOI 10.1234/jcs.2024.012. APA output: Smith, J. (2024). Reading patterns in adults. Journal of Cognitive Studies, 12(3), 45-62. https://doi.org/10.1234/jcs.2024.012. MLA output: Smith, John. "Reading Patterns in Adults." Journal of Cognitive Studies, vol. 12, no. 3, 2024, pp. 45-62, doi.org/10.1234/jcs.2024.012. Same source, two formats, different conventions.

Where automated citation generation gets dicey: edge cases. A book chapter in an edited volume needs both the chapter author and the editor's name, formatted differently. A government document might have a corporate author ("U.S. Department of Education") that doesn't follow normal author rules. A YouTube video from a channel needs the channel as author and the upload date. A podcast episode needs the host, guests, and the show as a container. The generator handles the common cases well; verify unusual sources against the official style manual or use Zotero, EndNote, or Mendeley for serious research workflows. Free citation tools are great for undergrads; serious researchers benefit from a proper reference manager that integrates with their writing tool.