Citation generator
Create correctly formatted academic citations without signing up. Choose your citation style and source type, enter the source details, and copy the finished citation — the reference-list entry plus the in-text citation or footnote where your style uses one.
Citation styles StudyRef supports
10styles, each with its own formatter rather than a shared template with the punctuation swapped. The differences are real: APA 7 writes a DOI as a link where IEEE wants it bare, Chicago Notes produces footnotes instead of parenthetical citations, AGLC4 inverts the first author's name in a bibliography, and MLA cites by author and page rather than author and year.
- APA 6th
- APA 7th
- MLA 8th
- MLA 9th
- Harvard
- Harvard Australia
- Chicago 18th Author-Date
- Chicago 18th Notes
- AGLC4
- IEEE
This list is read from the same registry the generator itself runs on, so a style appears here exactly when its formatter is released — never sooner.
Source types you can cite
Different sources need different facts — a podcast episode has a host and a series where a journal article has a volume and a DOI — so the generator asks only for what the source type you pick actually uses, instead of showing one enormous form.
- Website
- Website
- Books
- Book · E-book · Book chapter
- Journals
- Journal article (DOI) · Online journal (no DOI) · Google Scholar journal article
- News & magazines
- News article · Magazine article
- Reports
- Government / business report · Annual report · PDF / report document
- Course materials
- Lecture notes / course material
- Media
- YouTube video · Video (other platform) · Podcast episode
- Social media
- Instagram post · Facebook post · X/Twitter post · TikTok post · LinkedIn post · Threads post · Other social media post
- Academic works
- Thesis · Dissertation · Conference paper · Research / working paper
- AI-generated content
- AI-generated content
- Other
- Other
- Legal (AGLC4)
- Case · Legislation
Availability follows the style: the picker only offers combinations the selected style's formatter actually supports. AGLC4 is the specialist — it formats journal articles, books, chapters and its legal source types, and the legal types appear only when AGLC4 is selected. IEEE covers the eleven source types its reference guide defines templates for.
How to generate a citation
- Step 1
Choose the citation style your course brief names.
- Step 2
Pick the source type — website, journal article, book, and so on.
- Step 3
Enter the source details. Required fields are marked; optional ones can stay empty.
- Step 4
Generate, then copy — pasting into Word or Google Docs keeps the italics.
If a detail is genuinely missing — an undated web page, a work with no credited author — leave the field empty and the style's own fallback rules apply, the same rules the styles publish for exactly that situation. StudyRef never invents a date or an author to make the output look complete.
Citation generator vs reference checker
Two different starting points, two different tools.
You have the source's details
Use this citation generator: it turns the details into a citation formatted to your style's rules.
You already have the reference list
Use the free Reference Checker: paste the list and it reports what doesn't match the style, with a corrected version where a safe fix exists.
Manual entry vs source lookup
This free tool is manual entry: you provide the details, StudyRef provides the formatting. That is a deliberate design, not a limitation dressed up as one — a manual generator needs no external service, so it works identically whether the citation registries are up, slow, or down.
With a free StudyRef account, the signed-in Citation Generator can also look a source up — paste a URL, DOI or ISBN and it pre-fills the form from the source's own metadata for you to review before generating. Lookup runs against external registries and real web pages, which is why it lives behind an account rather than on a public page.
What a citation generator can't verify
A citation generator turns details into a correctly shaped citation. It cannot know whether those details are true. If the year is wrong, the citation will be a perfectly formatted citation with the wrong year; if the source doesn't exist, it will be a perfectly formatted citation for a source that doesn't exist.
So nothing this page produces is “verified”, and StudyRef will not use that word here. Checking a reference's formatting is the free Reference Checker's job; checking your citations against your actual assignment is part of the free Assignment Checker; and confirming a source's details against the registry it lives in is an account capability that reports only what the registry actually confirms.
Citation generator FAQ
- Can I generate citations for free?
- Yes. The citation generator on this page is free and complete: choose a style and source type, enter the details, and copy the finished citation. There is no trial, no watermark, and no citation held back behind a payment.
- Do I need an account to use the citation generator?
- No. Manual citation generation works without an account, an email address or a sign-up. An account adds different things: filling in source details automatically from a URL, DOI or ISBN, keeping citations together in projects, and exporting a finished reference list.
- Which citation styles does StudyRef support?
- APA 6th and 7th, MLA 8th and 9th, Harvard and Harvard Australia, Chicago 18th in both its Author-Date and Notes forms, AGLC4 and IEEE. Each style has its own formatter with its own rules — none of them is another style with the punctuation swapped.
- Can I generate an in-text citation as well as the reference?
- Yes, and the shape depends on the style. Author-date and author-page styles produce a parenthetical in-text citation alongside the reference-list entry. Chicago Notes and AGLC4 produce a footnote and a bibliography entry instead. IEEE cites by a bracketed number assigned by where the source first appears in your own document, so StudyRef gives you the complete reference and explains how to number it rather than inventing a number for you.
- Can I cite a website?
- Yes — website is the first source type in the picker for every general-purpose style. StudyRef asks for the page title, author if there is one, the site name, the URL and the dates, and formats them to the style you chose.
- Can I cite a journal article?
- Yes. There are separate source types for a journal article with a DOI, an online journal article without one, and an article found through Google Scholar, because the styles format those differently — a DOI, for example, is written one way in APA 7 and a completely different way in IEEE.
- Can I cite legal sources?
- Yes, in AGLC4: cases (reported and medium-neutral) and legislation, including delegated instruments, with pinpoint support. Legal source types appear in the picker only when AGLC4 is the selected style, because no other supported style defines a format for them.
- What's the difference between a citation generator and a reference checker?
- A citation generator builds a citation from details you provide. A reference checker reads a citation you already have and reports what doesn't match the style's rules. StudyRef has both — if your reference list already exists, the free Reference Checker is the tool for the job.
- Does StudyRef verify that the source exists?
- No. The free generator formats the details you type — it does not look the source up, so a correctly formatted citation is not evidence that the work exists or that the details are right. Source lookup and verification are separate, account-based capabilities, and even they verify only what a registry or page actually confirms.
- Can StudyRef fill in the details from a URL, DOI or ISBN?
- With a free account, yes — the signed-in Citation Generator can look up a URL, DOI or ISBN and pre-fill the form for you to review. The public tool on this page is manual entry only, so the free path keeps working even when every metadata service is down.
- Does StudyRef save my citation?
- No. Anonymous citations are formatted, returned and forgotten: no citation history, no account record, and nothing you type is stored. Saving citations into projects is what accounts are for.
- Why doesn't IEEE give me a citation number?
- Because the number isn't a fact about the source — it's a fact about your document. IEEE numbers references by the order they first appear in your text, so only you can know whether this source is [1] or [14]. StudyRef gives you the complete, correctly formatted reference and tells you how to number it.