Text tool
Citation & Bibliography Generator
Fill in the details of a source and get a correctly formatted reference in APA, MLA, Chicago or Harvard, with the in-text citation alongside it. Export the whole list as text or as BibTeX for LaTeX.
Everything happens in this page. Your sources are kept in this browser so a half-built list survives a reload, and nothing is sent anywhere or used to train anything.
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This tool needs JavaScript
The citations are formatted inside the page, so the browser has to be allowed to run scripts. Nothing is sent anywhere, but the tool cannot work without scripting switched on.
How this one works
Citing a source is two separate problems, and most citation mistakes come from treating them as one. The first is finding the details: author, year, title, where it was published. The second is arranging those details in the order and punctuation a particular style requires. This tool does the second one properly and cannot help with the first at all.
What it formats, and what it cannot check
Fill in the fields you have and it produces a formatted reference plus the in-text citation to go with it. It has no database behind it, so it cannot tell you whether a book exists, whether the year is the year of publication or the year of the edition you happened to pick up, or whether you have spelled the author’s name correctly. Everything you type is carried through faithfully, including a mistake. Check each entry against the original before it goes anywhere near an essay.
Why the styles differ, and which one you need
APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard disagree about what matters most. APA puts the year in brackets right after the author and uses initials, because it was designed for social science where you often refer to the same author’s several works together. MLA puts the page number in the in-text citation and spells out names, because it was designed for literature where you are discussing a specific passage. Chicago offers two systems, and the one this tool produces is the bibliography form. Harvard is close to APA but drops the full stop after the year and uses commas where APA uses periods. If your department has a house style, that is the one to use; if it just says one of these four, you are in the right place.
The details that decide whether a citation is right
More marks are lost to the small things than to the style. The author’s name is the most common: surname first in APA, MLA and Chicago, and in the reference list, but given-name-first in the in-text citation. Two authors are joined with “and” or an ampersand depending on the style and on whether you are in the bibliography or in the sentence. A title of a standalone work is italicised and the title of a part of a larger work is in quotation marks. A journal’s name and volume number are italicised together, which is a detail most tools get wrong. Page ranges take an en dash, not a hyphen, and one page takes no “pp.” at all.
It keeps nothing on a server
Your sources live in this browser’s local storage so a half-built list survives a reload, and you can copy the whole thing out or download it as a text file or a BibTeX file at any point. Nothing is uploaded. The trade is the one the whole site makes: the work happens on your machine, so the tool cannot quietly look up a DOI or fetch a title for you.
When to use something else
If you need a reference resolved automatically from a DOI or a URL, this is the wrong tool and a reference manager is the right one. If your course requires a bibliography generated by a specific system such as Zotero, produce it here and import it, but check the imported version rather than trusting the round trip. And if you are citing something you have not read, no amount of correct formatting makes it a legitimate source.
References that will not paste correctly
Bibliographies copied from a PDF or a web page often carry characters you cannot see: non-breaking spaces between initials, soft hyphens inside journal names, sometimes bidirectional controls inherited from an author list. They are invisible on screen and they stop a reference matching a style guide, a DOI lookup or a search. The invisible character cleaner removes them and normalises the quotes and dashes without changing a word.
Which style to use, and why the details matter
The citation styles differ less in punctuation than in purpose. APA and MLA are author-date and author-page respectively, both designed so a reader can find the source from the in-text marker alone. Chicago has both a notes system and an author-date system, and which one you need depends on the field rather than on preference.
Match the style your course or publication actually requires, and check it against their guidance rather than against a general example. The same style can have editions that differ on capitalisation, on how many authors are listed before et al., and on whether a DOI or a URL is preferred, and a marker that is right for one edition is wrong for another.
The details that are usually wrong are the ones that are easy to skip: the page range, the edition, the access date for a web source, and whether the publisher or the journal is named. These are the fields a marker checks, because they are the ones that let someone else find the source.
Fill in what you actually have rather than what the form appears to want. An invented date or a guessed page range is worse than an omitted one, because it looks complete and is wrong, and it will be trusted by whoever reads it.
More on this in the guides
If a citation is going into an internship application or an academic reference, licences and board exams and getting an internship in the Philippines cover the paperwork these citations sit inside. The full list is on the Student Guide page.
Further reading: Read the full guide: Citation & Bibliography Generator
Common questions
Does it check that my sources are real?
No, and that is the important thing to know about it. It formats the fields you type. There is no database behind it, so it cannot tell you whether a source exists, whether the year is the year of publication or the year of the edition you happened to hold, or whether you have spelled an author correctly. A citation that looks right but names a book that does not exist is worse than no citation, so every entry here needs checking against the original.
Which styles are supported?
APA 7th, MLA 9th, Chicago 17th in its notes-and-bibliography form, and Harvard. There is also a BibTeX output for LaTeX and reference managers such as Zotero. Pick a style at the top and the whole list reformats in place, which is useful when the same bibliography has to be handed in two ways.
What about the in-text citation?
It is shown under every entry, because that is where people actually get it wrong. APA and Harvard use the author and year in brackets, MLA and Chicago use the surname and a page number or year, and APA switches to "et al." from three authors onwards.
Where do my sources go?
Into this browser. The list is kept in local storage so a half-built bibliography survives a reload, and it can be copied out or downloaded as a text file or a .bib file at any point. Nothing is uploaded, and clearing this site’s data deletes the list.
What this tool does
Formats a reference in APA, MLA, Chicago or Harvard, with the in-text citation alongside it.
What you give it
A source's author, title, publication details and date.
What you get back
A formatted reference list, exportable as text or BibTeX.
It runs entirely inside your browser. Nothing you type or open is uploaded, and it works with the network disconnected.
Sources are kept in the browser, so a half-built list survives a reload.