Accurate citation is how scholarship keeps its accounts. Every source you acknowledge is a thread in a larger web of knowledge, and tracing those threads — forward and backward through time and discipline — is what separates understanding from assertion.
Enter a URL to fetch available metadata automatically, or fill in the fields manually. Citations are generated for four widely-used styles. No login, no fee, no email address required.
This site, 1990s onwards Referencing the web has been a concern here since the beginning. The paper, Academic Referencing of Internet-based Resources, in Aslib Proceedings was an earlier and simplified effort to consider web pages as sources of academic insight that should be documented with the possibility to return to at a later date.
This site, 1990s onwards The WWW Virtual Library guide to web citations, has been hosted here from the mid-1990s, addressed exactly this problem when academic guidance on citing online sources barely existed. The challenge is older and more persistent than most citation tools acknowledge.
For DOI-based citations
If your source has a Digital Object Identifier, the
DOI Citation Formatter ↗
at citation.doi.org generates precise, publisher-verified
citations directly from the identifier. Use it alongside this tool —
it handles journal articles with DOIs more authoritatively than any
page-scraping approach can.
— or fill in the fields below manually —
Use the title exactly as written. APA and Harvard use sentence case; MLA and Chicago use title case — see notes below.
The name of the website or organisation that publishes the page, not its domain.
Prefer a permanent or canonical URL. Auto-filled from the fetch above.
For multiple authors, generate with the first author then edit the output. The standard formats handle this differently.
Only include if 2nd edition or later.
Required by Chicago and Harvard; optional in APA and MLA.
Included where the style requires it, particularly for ebooks.
Spell out the full journal name; do not abbreviate.
If you have a DOI, the DOI Citation Formatter ↗ will give you the most authoritative version of this citation.
Generated citations — click Copy to copy to clipboard
About these citation styles
Developed for psychology and the social sciences, APA uses an author-date system: the surname and year appear in the in-text citation, and the reference list entry gives full details. The 7th edition (2020) removed "Retrieved from" before URLs and simplified the rules for digital sources considerably.
MLA is standard in the humanities, particularly literary studies and languages. It uses an author-page system for in-text citations. The 9th edition (2021) introduced a more flexible "container" model for nested sources (articles within journals, chapters within books) and simplified the handling of digital sources.
Chicago's notes-bibliography system, used mainly in history, fine arts, and some humanities, places citations in footnotes or endnotes with a corresponding bibliography at the end. (The author-date variant of Chicago, used in the sciences, is not included here.) The 17th edition covers digital sources comprehensively.
Harvard referencing has no single governing body; the Cite Them Right guide (Pears & Shields) is the most widely-used British version and the basis for this formatter. It uses an author-date system and is the default referencing style at many UK universities. Check which variant your institution requires — there are small differences between published guides.