Free Citation Generator – APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver

How to Cite Sources Correctly Across the Major Styles

A citation generator builds a correctly formatted reference for a source you enter, in whichever style your assignment or journal requires. Getting citations right matters for two reasons: it credits the original authors and avoids plagiarism, and markers deduct real marks for formatting slips. This tool supports the six styles students and researchers meet most — APA 7th edition, MLA 9th edition, Chicago 17th (both its systems), Harvard, IEEE, and Vancouver — across ten source types including books, journal articles, and websites. You enter the details by hand, which is deliberate: automatic lookups from a URL often grab the wrong author or date, and the small rules that vary between styles are where accuracy is won or lost. Each style has particular rules the tool applies. APA 7 lists authors last-name-first with an ampersand before the final one; when there are 21 or more authors, it lists the first 19, then an ellipsis, then the final author (a maximum of 20 names) — a rule frequently gotten wrong. APA article titles use sentence case while the journal name is italicised, and the year alone goes in parentheses. MLA 9 inverts only the first author; two authors are joined with and, and three or more collapse to the first author followed by et al. MLA italicises the container (the journal, website, or book that holds the source). Chicago 17 offers a notes-bibliography system and an author-date system, which differ in punctuation and order. IEEE and Vancouver are numbered styles, citing sources as bracketed or superscript numbers in the order they appear. The tool also produces the matching in-text citation for each reference. Here is a concrete example. A journal article by three authors in APA 7 renders all three names with an ampersand before the last, the year in parentheses, the article title in sentence case, and the journal name italicised with the volume, issue, and page range, ending in the DOI. The same three-author source in MLA 9 becomes the first author inverted followed by et al., then the title, the italicised container, and the publication details. The APA in-text citation is the author and year with a page number for a direct quote, like (Smith, 2020, p. 170), while MLA uses author and page, like (Smith 170). Enter twenty-five authors and the APA output correctly shows the first nineteen, an ellipsis, and the last author; enter three and MLA correctly switches to et al. A university student writing a psychology essay generates APA 7 references and pastes both the reference-list entry and the in-text citation into their paper. An engineering student uses IEEE, getting numbered references in order of appearance. A humanities student uses MLA 9 for a literature paper and Chicago for a history one, switching styles without relearning the rules. A researcher preparing a manuscript for a medical journal uses Vancouver to match the journal's requirement. In each case the value is not just formatting but getting the fiddly author-count and italics rules right. The mistake that costs marks is mixing styles or mishandling multiple authors — writing et al. in APA where all authors should be listed, or listing every author in MLA where et al. is required after the first. This tool encodes the current rules for each style so those cases are handled, but you should still proofread against your assignment's specific guidance, because instructors sometimes impose house variations and citation rules are updated between editions. Manual entry is more reliable than URL auto-fill precisely because you control every field. Everything is generated locally in your browser, so the sources and references you enter are never uploaded anywhere.

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