APA 7, MLA 9, and Chicago citations for books, articles, and websites
Pick a style, pick a source type, fill the fields, copy the result. APA 7 cites journal articles as Author, A. A. (Year). Title of article. Journal Name, Volume(Issue), pages, with a https://doi.org/ link when one exists; MLA 9 formats the same source as Author. "Title of Article." Journal Name, vol. X, no. X, Year, pp. X-X; Chicago as Author. "Title." Journal Name X, no. X (Year): X. Paste a DOI and the Crossref lookup fills the author, journal, volume, issue, and year for you. Titles you enter stay in the case you give them, except APA's sentence case, which the tool applies for you.
Copy grabs both formatted (italic) and plain-text versions when your browser allows. Always check the result against your assignment's style requirements; fields you leave blank are skipped, not invented.
| APA 7 | MLA 9 | Chicago 17 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Used in | Psychology, education, social sciences | Literature, languages, humanities | History, some social sciences |
| Reference list name | References | Works Cited | Bibliography |
| In-text form | (Author, Year) | (Author Page) | Note or (Author Year) |
| Author format | Last, F. M. | Last, First. | Last, First. |
| 3+ authors in-text | First author et al. | First author et al. | All listed (notes may shorten) |
| Article titles | Sentence case, no quotes | Headline case, quotes | Headline case, quotes |
| Journal name | Italics, Title Case | Italics, Title Case | Italics, Title Case |
| Date position | Right after author, in ( ) | Near the end | After journal/publisher |
| DOI | https://doi.org/... preferred | DOI or URL allowed | DOI or URL allowed |
| # | Element | Example | Skipped when absent |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Author | Brysbaert, Marc. | Start with title |
| 2 | Title of source | "How many words do we read per minute?" | Never (find it) |
| 3 | Title of container | Journal of Memory and Language, | Stand-alone sources |
| 4 | Other contributors | translated by Anne Applebaum, | Yes |
| 5 | Version | 2nd ed., | Yes |
| 6 | Number | vol. 109, no. 2, | Yes |
| 7 | Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf, | Yes (journals often omit) |
| 8 | Publication date | 2019, | Yes |
| 9 | Location | p. 104047, or a URL/DOI | Use one locator |
Citation styles disagree about punctuation and order more than about substance, so this tool keeps one set of source details and restyles it three ways. Fill in what the source actually says; the formatter assembles each style's pattern and skips anything blank rather than guessing.
Authors accept either "Last, First" or "First Last"; a comma tells the parser the name is already inverted. APA converts names to initials (Brysbaert, Marc becomes Brysbaert, M.), joins two authors with an ampersand, and uses et al. in-text for three or more. MLA inverts only the first author, writes the rest naturally, and truncates three or more to et al. Chicago keeps up to ten authors before shortening. For APA output, titles get automatic sentence case with protection for words that contain internal capitals or common acronyms, since APA lowercases most words but never NASA.
Paste a DOI and press the button: the tool queries Crossref's public API and fills in the authors, title, journal, volume, issue, pages, and publication date from the publisher's registered metadata. It's the same data Zotero and other reference managers use. The lookup runs straight from your browser; nothing is sent to our servers.
Take a real journal article, Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of reading rate in the Journal of Memory and Language, volume 109, article 104047, DOI 10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047. The same source in each dress:
And a book, Toni Morrison's Beloved (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987, New York):
Notice the tells: APA's initials and sentence case, MLA's absence of a city, Chicago's insistence on one. That's most of what separates the three styles on a day-to-day basis.
APA (7th edition) is standard in psychology, education, and the social sciences; MLA (9th edition) rules the humanities, especially literature and language. The visible differences: APA uses an author-date in-text citation like (Brysbaert, 2019) and sentence-case titles, while MLA uses an author-page form like (Brysbaert 104047), headline-style titles, and a Works Cited page instead of References. Chicago offers both a notes system and an author-date system and is common in history.
Usually not. APA 7 dropped the retrieved-from line for stable content: only add a retrieval date when the page's content is designed to change over time (a statistics dashboard, an evolving wiki). MLA treats access dates as optional, and Chicago recommends them mainly for undated or unstable pages. If the page has a publication date, cite that instead.
The DOI, always, when one exists. APA 7 formats it as a live https://doi.org/... URL and omits the database name for academic works. If there's no DOI, use the direct URL of the page, and if you're citing from a database without a stable link, end the citation with the database name. No period after a DOI or URL in APA.
Move the title into the author slot and alphabetize by it. In APA that's: Title of the work. (2026). Source. In MLA, start with the title in quotation marks (articles) or italics (books): "Title of Article." Journal Name, ... For in-text citations, use a shortened title: ("Short Title," 2026) in APA or ("Short Title") in MLA.
No. Instructors expect correctly formatted citations; how you produce them is your business, and professionals use reference managers daily. The academic integrity line is about citing sources honestly, not about formatting them by hand. Do verify the output against your style guide, since generators can't know your source's details better than you do.