Citing sources, explained
This free citation generator turns a DOI, ISBN, web address or title into a correctly formatted reference in APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 17 (notes-bibliography and author-date), Harvard, IEEE or Vancouver, and keeps a separate bibliography for every paper. Everything is stored in your own browser; there is no account and no ads.
How do I cite a journal article with a DOI?
Paste the DOI (for example 10.1038/s41586-020-2649-2) or the full doi.org link and press Search. The generator asks Crossref for the authors, title, journal, year, volume, issue and pages, and builds the reference. In APA 7 the DOI is written as a link: https://doi.org/10.1038/…. Use the DOI rather than the publisher's web address whenever one exists: it never changes.
How do I cite a book with an ISBN?
Type the ISBN-10 or ISBN-13, with or without hyphens. Title, authors, publisher and year come from Open Library, with Google Books as a back-up. Check the edition: APA and MLA only mention it from the second edition on, as in (2nd ed.). Chicago, IEEE and Vancouver also want the place of publication.
How do I cite a website?
Paste the URL. The page is read for its title, author, publication date and site name, including the hidden metadata many news and university sites provide. Websites often leave out the author or the date, so always check those two fields. Without a date, APA writes (n.d.), in Dutch (z.d.). When the author and the site are the same organisation, APA leaves out the site name. The date you looked at the page is filled in automatically for styles that use it.
APA in Dutch
Dutch and Flemish universities usually want APA 7 with Dutch terms. Choose APA 7 (Nederlands): the bibliography is called Literatuurlijst, a missing date becomes z.d., editors are (Red.), an edition is (2e dr.), months are written in Dutch and websites end with Geraadpleegd op 22 oktober 2026, van …. Check your own programme's guidelines, because some ask for small variations.
What is the difference between APA and MLA?
APA puts the year right after the author, because how recent a study is matters in the sciences: Jansen, P. (2023). Title. MLA puts the year near the end and uses full first names: Jansen, Pieter. "Title." Journal, vol. 3, 2023. In the text, APA cites (Jansen, 2023) and MLA (Jansen 12), with the page number.
Several papers, one tool
Make a project for each paper, thesis or course. Each project remembers its own style and sources, and you can switch between them with the menu at the top. Changing the style reformats the whole list at once. Two sources with the same DOI, or the same title and year, are marked as a possible duplicate.
Getting the bibliography into Word or Google Docs
Copy all copies the list with formatting: italics, the heading and the hanging indent survive when you paste into Word or Google Docs. Word (.docx) downloads a ready document in Times New Roman 12, double-spaced for APA, MLA and Chicago. BibTeX is for LaTeX and Overleaf, RIS for Zotero, Mendeley and EndNote.
Importing from Zotero, Mendeley or Google Scholar
Paste BibTeX or RIS in the Import tab, or choose a .bib or .ris file. In Google Scholar, click the quote sign under a result and choose BibTeX. Each entry is added to the current project and formatted in its style.
Privacy: what is sent where
Your projects and references stay in your browser's local storage. A DOI or title search goes to the public Crossref and Open Library catalogues, an ISBN to Open Library (and Google Books if needed). To read a web page, its address is fetched through a public CORS proxy (allorigins.win, corsproxy.io as back-up), because browsers do not let one site read another directly. Nothing else leaves your device.
Always double-check
A citation generator is only as good as the data behind it. Catalogue records sometimes have titles in capitals, missing first names or the wrong type of publication. Check capitalisation (APA wants sentence case for article and book titles), names and page numbers before you hand in your work.
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