Citation Generator — APA, MLA & Chicago

Citations are unforgiving about commas, full stops and italics. Put the period in the wrong place and a marker will circle it in red. This generator writes APA 7, MLA 9 and Chicago citations for the four source types students cite most: books, journal articles, websites and newspaper articles. The matching in-text citation or footnote appears beside each entry, ready to copy.

Authors go in one per line as “Walker, Olivia” and a second on the next line. The tool initials the given names for APA (Walker, O., & Matthews, D.), keeps full names for MLA and Chicago, and applies each style’s et al. rule. Three or more authors trigger et al. in MLA, four or more in Chicago, and twenty-one or more in APA. A date typed as 2020, March 15 is reshaped per style: APA’s 2020, March 15, MLA’s15 Mar. 2020, Chicago’s March 15, 2020.

Worked Example: a Two-Author Journal Article

Press Load Sample and the form fills with Walker, Olivia and Matthews, Daniel as the authors, Sleep duration and academic performance in undergraduate students as the title, Journal of Sleep Research as the container, volume 29, issue 3 and pages 123–145, with the DOI in the URL field. With APA 7 selected the reference list entry reads Walker, O., & Matthews, D. (2020). Sleep duration and academic performance in undergraduate students. Journal of Sleep Research, 29(3), 123–145. https://doi.org/10.1111/jsr.12945, and the in-text citation underneath reads (Walker & Matthews, 2020). Switch to MLA 9 and the same source becomes a Works Cited entry whose pages shorten to pp. 123–45. Switch to Chicago and the lower box turns into a numbered first footnote: 1. Olivia Walker and Daniel Matthews, “Sleep duration and academic performance in undergraduate students,” Journal of Sleep Research 29, no. 3 (2020): 123–45.

What Each Field Controls

• Authors one per line as “Last, First.” APA reduces them to initials and joins the last with an ampersand; MLA reverses only the first name and uses and; Chicago reverses only the first name and uses and, switching to et al. from the fourth author.
• Title is italicised for a book (and, in APA, for a webpage), quoted for articles and chapters. The journal, site or newspaper name is the italicised container.
• Year / date: a bare 2020 for books and journals; a full date for websites and newspapers. Leave it blank and every style prints n.d.
• Container is the publisher, journal name, site name or newspaper name. Its label changes with the source type, and a journal or newspaper article without one is refused with the message “Journal articles need a journal name.”
• Volume, issue, pages are journal fields. The page range uses an en dash and shortens in MLA and Chicago when it can do so unambiguously.
• URL / DOI is the article or page address, appended to the end of every style. Date accessed appears only for websites and is written by MLA and Chicago.

Format Notes: Accepted Inputs and Style Differences

Page ranges work differently across styles. For MLA and Chicago a three-digit range with a shared prefix shortens: 123–145 becomes 123–45. The kept suffix must be at least two digits, so 100–105 stays in full rather than collapsing to 100–05 and looking like a typo. APA keeps the full range in all cases. The page cap is 9,999 per side; anything wider stays as typed.

Every style switches to n.d. when the year is blank. Websites require a URL, and the field shows an error when it is empty. The copy buttons output plain text, so the italics rendered on screen do not survive the paste. Titles shown in italics above need to be re-italicised in the document after pasting. Picking Chicago also rewrites the second output box entirely: it is no longer a parenthetical citation but a numbered first footnote, ready to drop to the bottom of the page.