Citation Generator — APA, MLA, IEEE, Harvard & Chicago

A citation has two halves that must always match: the in-text marker inside your sentence and the full entry in the reference list. This tool builds both from the same fields, so they can never drift apart. There is no maths and no network call — each style is a fixed template, and the generator substitutes your data into it exactly as the official manual specifies.

The work is in three deterministic steps:

1. Author names are normalised per style. APA, Harvard and Chicago invert the first author to Surname, Initials; IEEE writes initials first (N. Perera); MLA spells the first author's given name in full. Each style has its own rule for many authors — IEEE and Harvard switch to et al. after three, while APA lists up to twenty before using an ellipsis.
2. Titles and containers are punctuated. Article titles are quoted in IEEE and MLA; book and journal names are italicised in every style. Page ranges are rendered with an en dash (110–125), and a bare DOI is expanded into a https://doi.org/… link.
3. The date is handled.A missing year prints "n.d." (APA) or "no date" (Harvard); MLA and Harvard append an Accesseddate for web pages. The parts are then assembled into the style template and the matching in-text citation is generated from the first author's surname and year, or — for IEEE — the source's position in your list.

Capitalisation of the title is preserved exactly as you type it. That is deliberate: auto-changing case is the single biggest source of wrong citations because it mangles proper nouns and acronyms (it would turn "Sri Lanka" into "sri lanka" or "DNA" into "dna"). Enter the title in the case your style requires — sentence case for APA and Chicago article titles, title case for MLA and IEEE — and the tool keeps it intact. To prove the templates are right, three full references reconciled by hand against the APA, IEEE and Harvard manuals are re-run through the engine on every page load; the badge on the calculator shows the result.

• APA Style — references guide
• MLA Style Center
• IEEE Reference Guide
• Cite Them Right (University of Leeds)
• The Chicago Manual of Style

Each style template was reconciled by hand against the cited manual on 2026-06-11. Style guides are revised periodically; this page is reviewed whenever a new edition of a manual is published.