Study & learning

Citation Generator

Reference list entry and in-text citation, formatted for the four styles almost every course uses.

Citation styleSource typeAuthor(s)Separate people with commas or 'and'. Leave blank if the source has no author.Title of the workWebsite, journal, publisher or channelYear publishedURL or DOIVolume, issue, pages or editionDate accessedNeeded by MLA and Harvard for web pages.

Reference list entry

Doe, J., & Smith, J. A. (2025). How search engines rank pages. Search Journal. https://example.com/ranking

In-text citation

(Doe et al., 2025)

Check this

Check capitalisation against your style guide: APA uses sentence case for titles, MLA and Chicago use title case.

Getting references right

A citation has two halves and students usually only produce one. The reference list entry identifies the source; the in-text citation points to it at the moment you use it. Missing in-text markers is the most common way an otherwise honest essay gets flagged.

Hanging indents, italics and punctuation vary between styles and between institutions within a style. Paste the entry into your document, then compare it against the one example in your course handbook — that example outranks any generator, including this one.

Never cite a source you have not opened. Reference lists assembled from search snippets collapse the moment a marker follows one link, and a single dead or mismatched citation casts doubt on every other line of the essay.