APA Citation Generator (APA 7th Edition)

What is an APA citation generator?

An APA citation generator takes the raw details of a source — who wrote it, when, what it is called, where it was published — and arranges them into the two things APA style actually asks for: a reference-list entry and an in-text citation. This tool follows APA 7th edition, the version currently used by most psychology, education, nursing and social science courses, and it covers the four source types students hit most often: journal articles, books, book chapters and websites.

Every template it uses was checked against a published example from the style's own documentation or a university library guide, and the tool's test suite reproduces those examples character for character. You can also switch the same engine to MLA, Harvard or Chicago from the row of style buttons at the top, which helps when you are citing the same source for two different classes. Pick your source type, fill in the fields, and the reference entry and in-text citation build themselves below the form as you type — there is no separate generate step.

How to use it

1. Choose APA and your source type. The style row (APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago) is already set to APA; the row below it switches between journal article, book, book chapter and website, which changes the fields you will see next.
2. Fill in the fields, or paste a DOI for journal articles. For a journal article, drop the DOI into the DOI box and hit Look up to fill in authors, date, title, journal, volume, issue and pages automatically; otherwise type the authors (one per line, surname first), the date, the title, and the remaining details — publisher and edition for a book, book title and editors for a chapter, or site name, URL and date accessed for a website.
3. Copy your reference and in-text citation. Both boxes update as you type, with the italicised parts already in place; hit Copy on either one to grab it for your reference list or your paragraph.

Sentence case, title case, and what this tool will not guess

APA wants sentence case for titles — capitalise only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns, as in “Data and experience design: Negotiating community-oriented research.” MLA and Chicago want title case instead, capitalising most words: “Writing New Media: Theory and Applications.” These rules sound simple until you hit a title with a brand name, an acronym, or a proper noun buried in the middle of a sentence — at which point no simple find-and-replace can get it right every time.

So this tool does not try. It never changes the capitalisation of the title field — it prints it back exactly as you typed it. That is a deliberate choice: guessing which words are proper nouns and quietly getting some of them wrong would be worse than not guessing at all. Type your title the way your chosen style wants it — sentence case for APA and Harvard, title case for MLA and Chicago — and the tool will preserve exactly that.

What to check before you submit

A few things are worth knowing about the other styles. Harvard is not a single fixed standard the way APA is — it is a family of author-date styles that vary between universities and sometimes between departments in the same university. This tool follows Cite Them Right, the version most widely used in UK institutions, but you should check your own course handbook before relying on it. The Chicago option here is notes-bibliography style (a bibliography entry plus a shortened note) rather than Chicago's other system, author-date — if your course uses Chicago author-date, this will not match.

On the technical side: the DOI lookup is the only feature that leaves your browser, sending the DOI to CrossRef, a free public metadata service, to fetch the article's details. Everything else — all the typing and all the formatting — happens on your device, and there is no ISBN lookup, so books and web pages are typed in by hand. The tool also formats one source at a time rather than keeping a running bibliography, and it saves nothing: reload the page and the form is empty again.

Most importantly, no generator — this one included — can judge whether a source is appropriate for your assignment or whether you copied its details down correctly. Check the output against your style guide before you submit.

Why is it free?

This generator runs entirely in your browser, so there is no server-side cost per citation to recoup — no account, no email wall, no paywall, and no ads gating the reference you actually came for. That is a deliberate contrast with the well-known citation sites, which tend to be either paywalled past the first few uses or wrapped in enough advertising that finding your actual citation takes longer than writing it by hand would have.