Citation Formatter

What is this for?

References are the bit of academic writing nobody likes and everybody loses marks on. This formatter takes the fields you already know (author, year, title, journal, publisher, pages…) and produces a clean citation in APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago author-date, or Harvard, ready to drop into your bibliography. No DOI lookups, no upload, no signup — everything stays in your browser.

How to use it

• Pick a style at the top — APA 7 is the default. Switch any time; the same fields render to all four styles instantly.
• Choose the source type (book, journal article, website, chapter, conference paper, thesis, news article, report). The fields update to what each type needs.
• Authors: one per line, in Last, First Middle form. A single line without a comma is treated as an organisation (e.g. World Health Organization).
• Add multiple sources with "+ Add source" to build a full bibliography. Use "Sort A→Z" to alphabetise by first author's last name.
• Copy the plain-text output (italics removed for clipboards that don't support rich text). Paste into Word / Google Docs and the words will be there; italicise titles by hand if your target document strips formatting.

Style notes

• APA 7 — sentence-case article titles, italic journal titles, "&" between final authors. Lists up to 20 authors before using "…". Uses (n.d.) for unknown year.
• MLA 9 — title-case titles, first author Last, First then subsequent authors First Last; "et al." for 3+ authors.
• Chicago — author-date variant. Bibliography style. Notes-bibliography is a separate convention and isn't generated here.
• Harvard — UK-style author-date. Single quotes around article titles; "et al." for 4+ authors. (Note: Harvard isn't a single fixed style — institutions vary in punctuation and ordering. Check your university's style guide.)

Common gotchas

• Author order matters. Don't sort the authors of a multi-author paper — keep the order from the source.
• Capitalisation differs by style. APA uses sentence case for article titles ("The impact of remote learning"); MLA uses title case ("The Impact of Remote Learning"). The tool converts automatically based on the style.
• DOI is preferred over URL when both are available — DOIs are stable, URLs rot.
• Italics don't survive plain-text copy. The HTML preview shows italics; the copy-button output is plain text. If your target system supports rich text, copy directly from the preview instead.
• This is a formatter, not a fact-checker. Garbage in, garbage out — verify volumes, page numbers, and spelling against the original source.
• Privacy. No data leaves your browser. Closing the tab clears everything.