How to create a citation
- Choose the citation style your teacher or journal asks for: APA 7th, MLA 9th, Chicago 17th (bibliography) or Harvard.
- Choose the source type and fill in the details: authors (one per line), title, website or journal name, date, volume and pages, publisher, and URL or DOI.
- The formatted reference and the matching in-text citation appear instantly. Copy with italics to paste into Word or Google Docs, or add it to your list, which is sorted alphabetically for your bibliography.
Getting citations right
Each style orders the same information differently. APA, used in psychology, education and the sciences, puts the year straight after the authors and uses initials and sentence case for titles. MLA, common in the humanities, uses full names, title case, quotation marks for articles and includes an access date for web pages. Chicago bibliography style uses full names and title case and is favoured in history; Harvard is an author–date style widely used in UK universities, with many local variations. Titles of books, journals and websites are italicised; titles of articles are not.
Always check the result against your institution's guide, especially for unusual sources, capitalisation of proper nouns in APA's sentence case, and the exact Harvard variant your university uses. Collect DOIs for journal articles when you can: they are permanent links that publishers maintain. Your reference list is saved in this browser only, so copy it into your document when you finish.
What is the difference between APA and MLA?
APA uses author–date in-text citations like (Smith, 2024) and a reference list; MLA uses author–page like (Smith 45) and a works cited list with full first names.
What if there is no author?
Leave authors empty. The title moves to the author position, as the styles require.
Do I need the access date?
MLA recommends it for web pages that may change; Harvard usually requires it. APA 7 does not, unless the page is designed to change over time.