Citation generator. APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard, done carefully.

The quickest way to see how the styles differ is to run the same sources through all four. The article below is Cepeda and colleagues' 2006 review of spacing research, which has five authors; the book is the fifth edition of The Craft of Research, also by five authors. These are the generator's exact outputs. Italics don't show in this paragraph text, so each one says what to italicize.

APA 7. Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354 - with the journal name and the volume number in italics. The book: Booth, W. C., Colomb, G. G., Williams, J. M., Bizup, J., & FitzGerald, W. T. (2024). The craft of research (5th ed.). University of Chicago Press. - with the title in italics.

MLA 9. Cepeda, Nicholas J., et al. “Distributed Practice in Verbal Recall Tasks: A Review and Quantitative Synthesis.” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 132, no. 3, 2006, pp. 354–80, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354. The book: Booth, Wayne C., et al. The Craft of Research. 5th ed., U of Chicago P, 2024. The journal and the book title are italic.

Chicago 18. Cepeda, Nicholas J., Harold Pashler, Edward Vul, John T. Wixted, and Doug Rohrer. “Distributed Practice in Verbal Recall Tasks: A Review and Quantitative Synthesis.” Psychological Bulletin 132, no. 3 (2006): 354–80. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354. The book: Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, Joseph Bizup, and William T. FitzGerald. The Craft of Research. 5th ed. University of Chicago Press, 2024. Again, the journal and the book title are italic.

Harvard (Cite Them Right). Cepeda, N.J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J.T. and Rohrer, D. (2006) ‘Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: a review and quantitative synthesis’, Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), pp. 354–380. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354. The book: Booth, W.C., Colomb, G.G., Williams, J.M., Bizup, J. and FitzGerald, W.T. (2024) The craft of research. 5th edn. University of Chicago Press. The journal and the book title are italic.

Look at what moves. APA lists every author up to 20, with initials and an ampersand. MLA names only the first author once there are three or more. Chicago lists up to six, and Harvard lists everyone. APA and Harvard put article and book titles in sentence case, while MLA and Chicago use title case. MLA and Chicago shorten the page range to 354–80; APA and Harvard print it in full. MLA also shortens University Press to UP, and Harvard writes edn where the others write ed.

Use the one your instructor, department or journal names - that always wins. As a rough guide, APA is the default in psychology, education, nursing and much of the social sciences. MLA is standard in English, modern languages and other humanities. Chicago's notes-and-bibliography system is common in history and art history; this tool makes its bibliography entries, which are the list at the end of the paper. Harvard is widespread in British and Australian universities.

Editions matter, because the rules change. This generator follows APA 7 (2020), the MLA Handbook's ninth edition (2021) and the Chicago Manual of Style's 18th edition (2024). Chicago 18 dropped the place of publication for books and capitalizes prepositions of five or more letters in titles, so About and Between now get capitals where Chicago 17 lowercased them. Harvard has no official manual at all, so universities each publish their own version. This tool follows Cite Them Right, 13th edition (2025), the version many UK universities point to, which now uses sentence case for titles and no longer gives a place of publication.

An automatic generator can't know what your instructor expects. Some courses still ask for APA 6, MLA 8 or Chicago 17, and many departments have their own Harvard variant with small differences in punctuation. If your brief includes a sample reference, compare the generator's output with it before you hand anything in.

A DOI (digital object identifier) is a permanent link to a published work. It's usually printed on the first page of a journal article, near the abstract, and it looks like 10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354. All four styles prefer a DOI to a web address, and all four now write it as a full link: https://doi.org/ followed by the DOI. Paste one into the DOI field and press Look up on Crossref, and the generator fills in the authors, title, journal, volume, issue and pages from Crossref's record. For books, an ISBN lookup asks Open Library for the same details.

Use a URL only when there's no DOI. MLA prints web addresses without https://, the other three keep it. Access dates differ more: APA gives a retrieval date only for pages designed to change, such as a live data dashboard; MLA suggests one when a page has no publication date; Chicago adds one for undated web content; and Harvard always gives one with a web address. The generator applies the right rule for the style you pick, so fill in the date you accessed a page and let it decide whether to print it.

Lookups are a starting point, not the final word. Crossref records for book chapters sometimes leave out the book's editors, and catalog records sometimes drop a leading The or fold the edition into the title. The form marks every field a record didn't have, and it's worth checking the rest against the title page or the article itself.

Citing the database instead of the source. If you found an article through a library database, cite the journal it was published in, with its DOI. APA tells you to leave the database's name out, and a database link that only works behind your campus login won't work for your reader.

Getting the capitalization backwards. APA and Harvard want sentence case for article and book titles, even when the original is in title case, but title case for journal names. Automatic case conversion is best-effort: it can't tell that United States or Agatha Christie is a name when the title was typed in title case. Check names of people, places and organizations, or tick Keep my capitalization and type the title exactly as it should appear.

Using et al. in an APA reference list. In APA 7, et al. belongs in the in-text citation for three or more authors, such as (Cepeda et al., 2006). The reference list names everyone up to 20. MLA is the opposite: et al. appears in the works-cited entry itself.

Mixing editions and dates. Cite the edition you read, from the book's copyright page, and the year printed there. For a journal article, use the year of the issue it appeared in. Then keep the whole list in one style. A tidy, consistent list is easier to mark, and the word counter can tell you whether your references count toward the limit, which depends on your course.