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About Citations Generator

Citations Generator is a free tool for building accurate academic references in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard and more than 2,800 other styles — with no account, and without getting in your way.

Why we built it

Students and researchers lose hours to citation formatting: comma placement, italics, author order, edition quirks. Our goal is simple — produce a correct reference in seconds so you can get back to writing. Every generator on this site is free to use, with no sign-up and no limit on how many sources you cite.

How our citations are generated

Accuracy is the entire point of a citation tool, so we don’t hand-roll formatting rules. Citations Generator runs on citeproc-js and the Citation Style Language (CSL) — the same open-source engine and style definitions used by reference managers such as Zotero and Mendeley. When you pick a style, we apply that style’s official CSL definition, so the output reflects the current published edition of the style.

  • 2,800+ styles from the community-maintained CSL project.
  • Autocite that retrieves metadata from Crossref (by DOI), Open Library (by ISBN) and page metadata (by URL), so you type fewer fields by hand.
  • Exports to Word, BibTeX and RIS, plus a bibliography that stays in your browser between visits — no account needed.

Our guides

Alongside the tools, we publish plain-English guides to citing specific source types and understanding each style. They’re written to reflect the official style manuals — APA 7th, MLA 9th, Chicago 18th and others — and checked against those source rules. We try to explain not just the “how” but the “why”, and we’re honest about the cases where a rule is ambiguous or a source is missing information.

Accuracy and corrections

Citation styles change and edge cases are common. If you spot output that doesn’t match the current edition of a style, we want to know — please use our contact page. Corrections are prioritised, because a citation tool is only as good as the references it produces.

Independent

Citations Generator is an independent project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the American Psychological Association, the Modern Language Association, the University of Chicago, or any other style authority; style names are used only to identify the formats we support.