Hey Homework

Citation generator

APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard, with the in-text bracket included.

What the Citation generator does

Fill in what you have and it builds the reference and the in-text citation together, in whichever style your class uses. It also says what each style is for, so switching between them teaches you something rather than just reformatting. Nothing is sent anywhere: it runs in your browser.

Paste a link, a DOI or an ISBN, and the reference fills itself in: authors, title, where it was published, the year, then the formatted entry and the in-text citation together. Fifteen styles, including APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE and Vancouver, across twenty-five kinds of source, from a web page to a podcast to a dataset.

It works for a works-cited page, a bibliography or a single footnote, and it works before you know which style you have been asked for, because each style says what it is for and who uses it. Build the list as you research, copy it in order, or save each line into your work and file it under the class it belongs to.

More about the Citation generator

The in-text citation is where most marks are lost, and most free generators leave it out. Here it sits beside every reference in the form that style uses: an author-date bracket, an author-page bracket, a note number, or a numeral in square brackets for IEEE.

After a lookup, any field the source did not provide is lit, because a reference with no page numbers is the one that gets marked down. Fill it in and the entry updates as you type. If a site blocks automatic reading, you get the form instead of a made-up author.

Why ours is better

1

Nothing is invented.

The lookup does not ask a language model to guess. A DOI goes to Crossref for the publisher's own record, a link is read for the metadata publishers already emit, and a book goes to the library catalogs. A field is either found or left for you, never made up.

2

Fifteen styles that are actually right.

The styles were checked against published examples before shipping, which caught the errors most tools carry: numeric styles that write authors the wrong way round, a missing 'and' between two authors, an organization inverted into a person's name.

3

Switching styles teaches you something.

Each style says which subjects use it and why it looks the way it does. Change from APA to MLA and you see the year move, because in literature the page matters more than the date.

How it was built

The fifteen styles are four families with small differences, not fifteen separate programs: author-date, author-page, note, and numeric. That is why the numeric styles came out right on the second pass and not the first, when IEEE's initials-first names and year-last order turned out to be their own shape rather than a variant of Vancouver.

The generator runs in your browser, so it costs nothing to serve and nothing you type is stored unless you choose to save a line into your work. Saved citations become notes in your dashboard, filed under the class whose name and topics match the source, with the class changeable on the spot.

Keep what you work on

A free account keeps your questions together by class, remembers what you have covered, and gives you a weekly allowance rather than a daily one.