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Citation Formatter

Format a reference in APA, MLA, Chicago or Harvard from fields you enter

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Citation Formatter

How to use 3 steps
  1. Pick the citation Style and the Source type.
  2. Fill in the fields you have: Title, Year, authors, publisher, URL or DOI.
  3. Copy the formatted citation from Output.
Citation

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.

Four styles, four editions, and why the edition repeats every time

The four styles on offer are not evergreen standards; each is a specific, dated edition — APA 7th, MLA 9th, Chicago 17th in its notes-and-bibliography form, and Harvard as set out in Cite Them Right. Manuals get revised, and a finished citation carries no mark of which edition produced it once it is sitting in a reference list. That is why the [msm_tool slug="citation-formatter"] names the edition next to every result: it is the one piece of information you cannot recover later if a rule changes underneath you.

The same author list, formatted four different ways

APA and Harvard reduce every given name to initials and attach them to the surname with a comma — Smith, J. MLA and Chicago do the opposite: the first author is written surname-first, and every author after that reverts to natural order, first name before surname. Two styles compress a name; two only reorder the first one.

The four styles also disagree about when a list of authors becomes "et al." MLA switches at three authors, replacing everyone after the first with the abbreviation. Chicago is far more permissive and only switches beyond ten, listing the first seven. APA lists up to twenty authors in full, joined with an ampersand rather than the word "and," and only past twenty does it fall back to the first nineteen, an ellipsis, and the final name. Harvard uses the same initials-based name format as APA but joins the list with "and" — the one place the two styles that look most alike actually diverge.

An empty field does not become an error

The reference is assembled only from what you type in. Leave the publisher blank and the citation is built without one — no placeholder, no error — and the result states what it did not have. That line is worth reading before copying, because a field missing silently is indistinguishable from a field that was simply never given.

Capitalisation is a guess about your title, not a rule

APA and Harvard put a title in sentence case; MLA and Chicago put it in headline case. Neither transformation can tell a proper noun from an ordinary word, so a title containing a name or an acronym needs checking by eye either way — there is no way for the conversion to know which words in your title were never supposed to be lowercased.

Entering an organisation as the author

Author parsing looks for a comma to split a surname from initials. Type an organisation's name with no comma in it and it is treated as a single, indivisible name and passed through unchanged, rather than being torn into a fake surname and initials it was never meant to have.

Why the scope stops where it does

Four source types — book, journal article, web page, chapter in an edited book — and four styles, with no IEEE, Vancouver, AMA, films, datasets, interviews, legislation or social posts. A citation that is subtly wrong is not caught by anyone until the work has already been marked, so covering a source type badly is a worse outcome than leaving it out and saying so plainly.

What it is, and is not, a substitute for

Departments vary their requirements and manuals get revised out from under a generator that was correct when it was written. Treat the result as a draft that saves the typing and gets the structure right, and check it against the guide the work will actually be marked against before submitting anything.

Frequently Asked Questions

Specific to the Citation Formatter. Broader questions about this category are answered on the category page.

APA 7th, MLA 9th, Chicago 17th in its notes-and-bibliography form, and Harvard as set out in Cite Them Right. The edition is repeated under every result so a copied citation can be traced back to it.
Treat it as a draft. It saves the typing and gets the structure right, and your department may have its own variations. Check it against their guide before submitting — that is the document your work is marked against.
Because the styles disagree. APA and Harvard use sentence case, MLA and Chicago use headline case. Neither transformation can identify proper nouns, so check the result against the source.
Type the full name with no comma. Without a comma it is treated as a single name and passed through unchanged rather than being split into a surname and initials.
Because covering them badly is worse than not covering them. A wrong citation is not noticed until the work has been marked, so the scope is deliberately narrow and stated rather than quietly approximate.

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