Free Citation Generator

Free Citation Generator: APA, MLA, and Chicago in Seconds

Correct citations are a foundation of academic integrity. APA 7th edition, MLA 9th edition, and Chicago 17th edition each have distinct formatting rules for author names, date placement, title capitalization, and URL formatting. Manual citation is slow and error-prone. This free citation generator produces all three styles simultaneously from a URL or manual entry: no login, no subscription, no per-citation charge. Paste an article URL and the citation generator extracts the title, author, publication date, and site name automatically from the page's metadata.

For academic papers, books, and journals, use the Manual Entry form to specify volume, issue, page numbers, DOI, and other fields. Always verify the generated citation against your institution's style guide: citation formats update periodically and some journals use modified versions of standard styles. This citation generator produces a ready-to-copy string for each style, formatted with proper italics, punctuation, and ordering.

Students use this citation generator to format references for dissertations and term papers. Researchers use it to build bibliographies for journal submissions. Content writers use the citation generator to properly attribute statistics and studies in blog posts. For complete academic paper prep, pair this citation generator with the essay feedback tool to score argument quality, the grammar checker for error correction, and the word counter to verify length requirements.

How to Generate a Citation: Step by Step

Which Fields Each Source Type Needs

A citation is only correct if the required fields for that source type are present. Leaving one out is the most common reason a generated reference gets marked down, because every style has a fallback rule for missing data and the fallbacks differ between APA, MLA, and Chicago.

Websites and online articles: author, publication date, page title, site name, and URL. If no individual author is named, the organisation becomes the author — not “Anonymous”. If there is no date, APA uses (n.d.) and MLA expects an access date instead.

Books: author, year, title, publisher, and edition if it is not the first. Chapter authors in edited collections are cited differently from the editor of the book, which is a distinction the manual entry form lets you make.

Journal articles: author, year, article title, journal name, volume, issue, page range, and DOI. The DOI is the field most often dropped, and most style guides now treat it as required when one exists.

For the underlying formatting rules rather than the mechanics of this tool, see our guides on APA vs MLA vs Chicago and how to cite sources correctly.

What to Check Before You Submit

No citation generator is a substitute for a final read, this one included. Automatic extraction depends on how a page declares its own metadata, and plenty of sites declare it badly. These are the four things worth checking every time:

• Author names. Bylines are frequently stored as a username, a full sentence, or the publication itself. Anything that does not look like a person's name needs correcting by hand.
• Publication versus updated date. Many sites expose only the last-modified date. Citing a 2019 article as 2026 because it was touched by a CMS is a real and common error.
• Title capitalisation. APA uses sentence case for article titles; MLA and Chicago use title case. A title pulled verbatim from a page will usually be in the wrong case for at least one of the three.
• Your institution's house style. Departments often modify a standard style. Where your handbook and a citation generator disagree, the handbook wins.

Treat the output as a correctly structured draft rather than a finished reference. The citation generator handles the punctuation, ordering, and italics that are tedious to get right by hand; you supply the judgement about whether the underlying data is accurate.

Frequently Asked Questions