How this tool works
Enter the details of a source and it is assembled into a reference in one of four styles: APA 7th edition, MLA 9th, Chicago 17th in its notes-and-bibliography form, and Harvard as set out in Cite Them Right. Four source types are covered — book, journal article, web page, and chapter in an edited book — and the fields change to match, so you are never asked for a volume number on a book.
The edition each style follows is named on the page and repeated under every result, because a finished citation carries no indication of which edition produced it and the manuals are revised. Author names are formatted per style rather than copied through: APA and Harvard reduce given names to initials and join with an ampersand or the word and, while MLA and Chicago give the first author surname-first and the rest in natural order. MLA replaces three or more authors with the first plus et al.
Read this before you submit anything
- Check the result against your own guide: departments vary their requirements, style manuals are revised, and no generator is a substitute for the guide your work will actually be marked against. This one is a starting point that saves typing, not an authority.
- Anything you leave out is simply absent: the reference is built from the fields you fill in, so a missing publisher produces a citation without one rather than an error. The result lists what was missing, and it is worth reading that line before copying.
- Capitalisation is a heuristic: APA and Harvard use sentence case and MLA and Chicago use headline case, and neither can know which words in your title are proper nouns. Existing capitals are left alone, so type the title as it appears on the source and check the result.
- Four styles and four source types only: no IEEE, Vancouver or AMA, and no films, datasets, interviews, legislation or social posts. Covering those badly would be worse than not covering them, because the mistake surfaces after the work is submitted.