Citation Machines: Free Citation Generators for Students

Which citation style do I need?

If your brief doesn't name a style, ask your instructor. Your department's handbook usually decides.

• APA, with the APA citation machine: psychology, education, nursing and most social sciences. Author–date in-text citations, such as (Smith, 2020).
• MLA, with the MLA citation maker: English, literature and the humanities. Author–page citations, such as (Smith 42), and a Works Cited list.
• Chicago, with the Chicago citation generator: history and many humanities subjects. Use the Chicago footnote generator for notes and bibliography.
• Harvard, with the Harvard referencing generator: common at UK and Australian universities. Author–date, with details that vary from one university to another.
• IEEE, with the IEEE citation generator: engineering, computing and electronics. Numbered citations in square brackets, such as [1].
• Vancouver, with the Vancouver citation generator: medicine and the health sciences. Sources are numbered in the order you first cite them.
• Turabian, with the Turabian citation machine: a student version of Chicago, often used for papers and theses in history and theology.
• ASA, with the ASA citation generator: sociology. Author–year citations, such as (Smith 2020), and a References list.
• ACS, with the ACS citation generator: chemistry papers and lab reports. Numbered citations, often as superscripts.
• CSE, with the CSE citation generator: biology and other sciences, in citation-sequence, name-year or citation-name form.
• AMA, with the AMA citation generator: medicine, nursing and the health sciences. Superscript numbers in the order you cite.

Getting your citations right

A citation machine formats what you give it, so check the details it finds: author names spelled correctly, the right year, a DOI rather than a database link, and the page range for a journal article.

Use one style consistently through the whole paper. Reference lists in APA, MLA, Harvard and Chicago are alphabetical by the first author's surname, and the Alphabetizer sorts them in one step. Numbered styles such as IEEE and Vancouver follow the order of citation instead.

Format titles the way your style asks. APA uses sentence case for article and book titles in the reference list, which the Case Converter can do for you.

What a citation machine does, and what it can't

A citation machine looks up a source from its URL, DOI, ISBN or title, reads the details publishers attach to it, and formats them in the style you choose. That saves time and catches most punctuation errors. But it can only format what it finds: if a web page lists no author, a book's metadata misspells a name, or a journal record leaves out the issue number, the citation will be incomplete or wrong.

So treat every citation as a draft. Compare it against the source itself: the title page of a book, the first page of an article, or the top of a web page. Check the author names, the year, the title and, for articles, the volume, issue, pages and DOI.

In-text citations and reference lists

Every style has two parts that must match. The in-text citation points to the source at the place you use it: (Smith, 2024) in APA, (Smith 42) in MLA, a superscript footnote number in Chicago notes, or a bracketed number such as [1] in IEEE. The reference list, Works Cited page or bibliography at the end gives the full details of every source you cited, and only those.

Author-date and author-page styles list sources alphabetically; numbered styles such as IEEE and Vancouver list them in the order you first cite them. Most citation machines on this site let you build the whole list as you go and download it for Word, so you're not formatting everything the night before the deadline.

Citing sources that don't fit the usual patterns

• No author: start the entry with the title, or with the organization that published the page if one is clearly responsible.
• No date: APA uses (n.d.); MLA leaves the date out and may add the date you accessed the page; Chicago uses n.d. too.
• Lecture slides and course materials: many instructors prefer you cite the original source rather than the slides. If you must cite the slides, include the lecturer, the course, the date and where they were posted.
• AI tools such as ChatGPT: APA, MLA and Chicago have each published guidance on citing generative AI; follow your style's guidance and your course policy, which may not allow it at all.
• Secondary sources: if you read a quotation in one book that came from another, cite the source you actually read and say where the quotation came from, such as "as cited in" in APA.

Avoiding plagiarism when you cite

Citing a source doesn't make copied wording acceptable. Put direct quotations in quotation marks with a page number, and when you paraphrase, change both the words and the sentence structure, then still cite the source. Cite ideas, data, images and tables as well as words. If you're unsure whether something needs a citation, it usually does: common knowledge in your field is the main exception.

Citation styles at a glance

Whichever style you use, save the details of each source as you read, including the page numbers of anything you quote. Adding a source to your list the moment you use it is much faster than tracking down a half-remembered quotation the night before the deadline.

• APA 7: author-date in-text citations, such as (Smith, 2024, p. 45); reference list in alphabetical order; sentence case for article and book titles.
• MLA 9: author-page in-text citations, such as (Smith 45); Works Cited list in alphabetical order; title case for titles.
• Chicago notes-bibliography: numbered footnotes or endnotes plus an alphabetical bibliography; common in history and the humanities.
• Chicago author-date: in-text citations such as (Smith 2024, 45) with a reference list; used in the sciences and social sciences.
• Harvard: author-date in-text citations and an alphabetical reference list; details vary by university, so follow your handbook.
• IEEE and Vancouver: numbered citations in the order sources first appear, with a numbered reference list; IEEE uses square brackets.

Building a bibliography as you research

Start your reference list on the first day of research, not the last, and keep it in one place for the whole project. Each time you read a source you might use, cite it in the citation machine for your style and add it to your list, along with a short note on what it says and the pages you might quote. When you start writing, you will already have every reference formatted, and you can delete the ones you didn't use. Before you submit, download the list, paste it at the end of your paper, and check the order, the hanging indents and the spacing against your style guide.