Essays and discussion posts
Students can format the sources they already have instead of guessing where the period goes in APA.
APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago
Free Citation Generator
Build a reference for a book, a journal article, or a web page in APA 7, MLA 9, and Chicago author-date. The formatting runs in your browser from the fields you fill in.
Build a citation
One author per line. Formatting stays in your browser.
Add a title to see the citations.
How it works
01
Choose the source
Web page, book, and journal article each show the fields that style actually uses. You do not have to fill a publisher for a journal article.
02
Enter the people and the title
Put one author per line. “Maya Chen” or “Chen, Maya” both work. APA titles are converted toward sentence case; MLA and Chicago keep the capitalization you type.
03
Copy the style your assignment names
All three citations update together. Check the result against your handbook when the source is a chapter, a social post, or a source with no author.
When to use it
Dissertation reference lists
Article fields cover author, year, title, journal, volume, issue, pages, and DOI — the set most journal entries need.
Readers comparing styles
Seeing APA, MLA, and Chicago from the same form makes the differences in italics, quotation marks, and dates obvious.
Limits and accuracy
- These are common cases, not the whole manual. Edited books, translated works, religious texts, and legal cases need rules this form does not cover.
- APA sentence case can lowercase a proper noun that is not an acronym. Capitalize those by hand.
- Chicago output is an author-date bibliography entry, not a notes-and-bibliography footnote.
- The generator does not look up your source. It only formats what you type, in the browser.
Examples
Journal article
Two authors, a year, an article title, a journal, volume, issue, pages, and a DOI produce an APA entry with the article in sentence case, the journal and volume in italics, and a https://doi.org link.
Web page
A page with an author, a full date, a site name, and a URL produces an MLA entry with the title in quotation marks and the site name in italics, plus the day-month-year date.
Questions about this tool
APA 7th edition, MLA 9th edition, and Chicago author-date bibliography entries. Footnotes in Chicago notes-and-bibliography style are not generated.
Citations format the source. They do not write the paragraph.
Once the reference is in place, Refinely Human can help the surrounding prose sound like a student, researcher, or professional in your field.