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About this tool
Generate accurate citations in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, and Vancouver styles instantly.
The Citation Generator turns the details of a source — authors, title, year, publisher, journal, volume, pages, DOI or URL — into a formatted reference in APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE or Vancouver, across nine source types from books and journal articles to websites, theses, podcasts and YouTube videos. It handles the part students most often get wrong: inverting and abbreviating author names the way each style demands, so APA gives Smith, J. A. while IEEE gives J. A. Smith. Your last 50 citations are kept in the browser so you can rebuild a reference list without retyping.
Open Citation Generator on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Pick a source type from the Book, Website, Journal Article, Newspaper, Magazine, YouTube Video, Podcast, Thesis and Research Paper buttons, then pick a style from the six style buttons: APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE and Vancouver.
Fill in Author(s), Title and whichever fields that source type adds — Publisher, Year, Edition and City for a book, or Journal Name, Volume, Issue, Pages and DOI for a journal article. There is no Generate button: the preview panel below, headed with the style name, rewrites the citation as you type, and a Website source also offers a URL box with an Auto-fill button.
Use Copy Citation for the clipboard, TXT for a text download, Print / Save PDF for the browser print dialog, or Word .doc for an HTML-based file that Word can open. Press Save Citation to push the entry into History, where each row has Reuse and Copy and the panel has a Clear All.
APA renders initials after an inverted surname and joins with '&', MLA inverts only the first author, and IEEE puts initials first — the formatter applies each rule separately.
Book, website, journal article, newspaper, magazine, YouTube video, podcast, thesis and research paper each have their own field set and output shape.
The last 50 citations stay in your browser's local storage and can be exported as .txt or a Word-openable .doc, so a bibliography builds up as you research.
Six: APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE and Vancouver. APA 7, MLA 9 and IEEE have the most detailed per-source-type templates, including distinct handling for journal articles, websites and audio-visual sources.
APA 7 abbreviates given names to initials and joins authors with an ampersand — Smith, J. A., & Patel, R. MLA 9 spells the first author's given name out in full and inverts only that first name, joining the rest with 'and' — Smith, Jane, and Rahul Patel.
Yes. Up to 50 recent citations are stored in your browser's local storage on this device, so they survive a reload but are not synced to an account or another machine. Clearing site data removes them.
Check it against your institution's style guide before submitting. The templates follow the standard patterns for each style, but style manuals contain edge cases — corporate authors, missing dates, chapters within edited volumes — and your department may impose its own variations.