Citation Generator

How to reference journal articles correctly

Malformed references are the most frequent source of correction requests — and the most avoidable. The problem is not competence, it is volume: a thesis with sixty manually formatted references accumulates comma, italic and field-order errors that a reviewer will inevitably find.

APA 7th edition

The dominant standard in psychology, education and the social sciences. Structure for a journal article:

Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (2023). Title of the article in sentence case. Journal Name, 12(3), 45–58. https://doi.org/10.xxxx/xxxxx

Points where nearly everyone slips:

• The article title uses sentence case — only the first word, proper nouns and the word after a colon are capitalised. The journal name, by contrast, keeps title case.
• Italics fall on the journal name and the volume number, not on the issue number and not on the article title.
• The last author is preceded by an ampersand (&), not the word "and".
• Since the 7th edition you list up to 20 authors before using an ellipsis; the old "et al. after seven" rule is obsolete.
• The DOI appears as a full URL, with no "Retrieved from" and no access date for stable published content.
• Page ranges use an en dash (45–58), not a hyphen.

MLA 9th edition

Standard across the humanities and literary studies. The article title goes in quotation marks and title case, the journal is italicised, and the structure runs vol. / no. / year / pp. Unlike APA, MLA spells out author given names in full rather than reducing them to initials, and it uses the phrase "et al." after three or more authors.

Chicago

Common in history, area studies and book publishing. It comes in two flavours: the author-date system, close to APA, and the notes-bibliography system, which places full citations in footnotes. This tool generates the author-date form. Note that Chicago places the year immediately after the authors and separates volume, issue and pages with a colon.

Vancouver

Dominant in medicine and the health sciences. References are numbered in the order they appear in the text, and in-text citations use that number rather than author-date. Given names are reduced to initials without periods, up to six authors are listed before "et al", there is no typographic emphasis, and journal titles use standardised Index Medicus abbreviations.

Where to find the DOI

The DOI is the document's permanent identifier, in the format 10.xxxx/yyyyy. Look on the first page of the PDF (usually the header or footer); on the article page at the publisher's site; in Google Scholar results; or on PubMed. Articles published before 2000 and most book chapters have no DOI — in those cases formatting must be manual.

Why you should always check the output

This tool reads the metadata that the publisher itself deposited with Crossref. If the record is incomplete or wrong at source — a truncated author name, missing page numbers, a title in all caps — the generated reference will reflect that. Always verify against the original PDF, especially the spelling of names, the page range, and the publication year (which can differ from the year of advance online publication).

Frequently asked questions

Recommended workflow

Find the literature with the paper search, generate the references here and accumulate everything under "My references" to export in one go. Then, with your data collected, move on to the statistics calculator.