AkousaCitation Generator
Generate perfectly formatted APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard citations for books, websites, journals, and newspapers instantly.
Citation Style
Source Type
About Citation Generator
The free online Citation Generator instantly formats academic references in APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard styles for four source types: books, websites, journal articles, and newspapers. It eliminates the need to memorize style-guide rules — just fill in the source details and receive a perfectly formatted citation ready to paste into your paper. No account required, runs entirely in your browser.
How to Use
Select your required citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago, or Harvard) and choose the source type (Book, Website, Journal Article, or Newspaper). Fill in the fields that appear — author name, title, year, publisher, URL — then click Generate Citation. Copy the formatted reference directly to your clipboard and paste it into your bibliography or works-cited page.
Common Use Cases
- University students writing research papers can instantly format bibliography entries for any style required by their department — switching between APA for psychology and MLA for literature papers with a single click.
- Journalists and bloggers can properly attribute online sources by generating a correctly formatted website citation that includes the access date and URL according to the chosen style guide.
- Graduate students working on dissertations can use the journal article format to correctly handle volume, issue, and DOI fields that manually formatted citations often get wrong.
- High school teachers can use this tool in class to teach citation formatting live, generating examples and showing students how each style handles author order, capitalization, and punctuation differently.
- Researchers compiling literature reviews can quickly format citations for dozens of sources by working through the form for each one, cutting hours off the reference list compilation process.