Free Citation Generator
Generate accurate APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard citations from a DOI in seconds.
Why use The Citation Generator?
How to cite a journal article with a DOI
- Find the DOI on the article's first page or publisher landing page.
- Paste it into the input above and click Generate citation.
- Switch citation style with the tabs, copy the result into your paper.
The free citation generator for every academic style
The Citation Generator is a free online citation generator trusted by students, researchers and academic writers around the world. Paste a DOI, ISBN, URL or article title and our generator instantly builds a clean, accurate reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver, AMA, Nature and more — no signup, no paywall and no clutter. Whether you need a quick APA reference for a journal article, a properly formatted MLA Works Cited entry, or a Harvard reference list for a coursework essay, the same workflow works for every source type and every style.
Supported referencing styles
Stop juggling style guides. Generate citations in any major academic format with one click:
- APA citation generator — APA 7th edition references for psychology, education and social science papers.
- MLA citation generator — MLA 9th edition Works Cited entries for humanities and literature courses.
- Chicago citation generator — Chicago author-date references for history, social sciences and book manuscripts.
- Harvard referencing generator — Cite Them Right Harvard format for UK and Australian universities.
- IEEE bibliography generator — Numeric [1] [2] IEEE references for engineering, computer science and electronics.
- Vancouver citation generator — ICMJE Vancouver references for biomedical journals and medical theses.
- AMA citation generator — AMA 11th edition for JAMA and clinical research papers.
- Nature citation generator — Superscript Nature style for Nature, Scientific Reports and sister journals.
DOI, ISBN, URL or manual — cite any source
Our smart lookup understands every common academic identifier. Drop in a DOI (for example 10.1038/s41586-022-04567-7) and the metadata is fetched from Crossref in under a second. Paste an ISBN to cite a book, paste a webpage URL for online sources, or paste a PubMed ID (PMID) for biomedical articles. Need to cite something the lookup cannot find? Click Cite manually to fill in the fields yourself — perfect for theses, datasets, conference papers, lecture slides and other grey literature.
This makes the site one of the fastest free tools for DOI to citation, ISBN to citation, URL to APA citation, Crossref reference generator and convert DOI to BibTeX workflows.
Export to BibTeX, BibLaTeX, RIS and Word
Save citations into a Project and export your entire reference list with one click. The Citation Generator supports BibTeX (.bib) for LaTeX and Overleaf, BibLaTeX for modern LaTeX workflows, RIS for Zotero, EndNote and Mendeley imports, plus plain-text Word and Markdown exports for any word processor. Build a bibliography for a paper, a thesis chapter, a literature review or a research proposal — all formatted, sorted and ready to paste.
Built for students, researchers and academic writers
Thousands of users rely on The Citation Generator for everyday referencing tasks:
- Undergraduates writing APA reference lists for psychology essays.
- PhD students compiling Harvard bibliographies for thesis chapters.
- Engineers building IEEE reference lists for conference papers.
- Medical researchers preparing Vancouver and AMA references for clinical journals.
- Editors converting between APA and MLA in a single click.
- Librarians and teachers demonstrating proper academic referencing in class.
It is a 100% free academic referencing tool, runs entirely in your browser, and never sells your data. Create a free account to save your projects across devices.