Citation generator: APA, Vancouver and IEEE
Paste a messy reference, a DOI or a URL. Get it back correctly formatted in the style you need.
Formatting references by hand is mechanical work that eats hours and comes out wrong nearly every time: a comma out of place, the year in italics, the author inverted in some entries and not others.
Paste whatever you have, in whatever mess you have it, and get it back correct. No sign-up, no limit.
Data from doi.org, Crossref and PubMed. Formatting with citeproc-js (CPAL licence) and the Citation Style Language styles (CC BY-SA 3.0).
What it does
Anything goes in
A DOI, a URL, a reference copied out of a PDF with line breaks mid-word, or the text exactly as you jotted it down.
The styles journals actually ask for
APA 7, Vancouver, IEEE, ISO 690, Chicago and MLA 9, with the in-text citation as well as the bibliography entry.
In batches
Paste thirty references at once and get thirty back, formatted and sorted alphabetically or by order of appearance, whichever the style requires.
Export to your manager
BibTeX, RIS and CSV, straight into Zotero, Mendeley or EndNote.
How it differs
The well-known generators are built for coursework: they ask you to fill a form field by field. This one is built for someone who already has a written reference list and needs to convert it, which is the real case when you switch journals and are asked for a different style.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to sign up?
No. Free, no account, no limit on references.
What if my references are inside a PDF?
That is what Extract References is for: it pulls them from the full article and exports to BibTeX, RIS or CSV. This tool is for when you already have the reference text.
Does it check the reference exists?
Yes. With a DOI, PMID or arXiv ID, the data come from the source (doi.org, PubMed), which also fixes typos in your original reference. Without an identifier, we search Crossref for the text and only accept a match if the title agrees; we show you which record we found so you can check it. If nothing matches, we tell you. It also flags retracted papers.
In the meantime
This tool is available today and solves something adjacent:
Bibliographic Reference Extractor