Free citation generator

What this citation generator does

Give it a DOI or a paper title and it returns a single, ready-to-paste reference in six forms: APA, MLA, Vancouver, and Chicago for your manuscript, plus BibTeX and RIS for your reference manager. You can copy any style in one click or download a .bib or .ris file.

The part that matters: the formatting is deterministic. We pull the authoritative bibliographic record from CrossRef and OpenAlex — the same registries publishers and libraries use — and apply each style's rules to it directly. There is no language model paraphrasing the result, so the same DOI always produces the same citation, and the fields come from the registered metadata rather than a guess.

• Input: a DOI (most accurate) or a paper title
• Output styles: APA, MLA, Vancouver, Chicago
• Reference-manager exports: BibTeX (.bib) and RIS (.ris)
• Deterministic and zero-LLM — reproducible, not invented
• Free, no signup, nothing stored on our servers

DOI-first is the accurate way to cite

Most citation mistakes come from typing — a dropped co-author, the wrong year, an abbreviated journal name. Starting from a DOI sidesteps almost all of that. The DOI resolves to a single canonical record at CrossRef, and we cross-reference OpenAlex to fill in anything missing, so the author list, year, volume, issue, pages, journal, and the DOI link itself come straight from the source of record.

If you do not have the DOI handy, a title search works too — it just relies on matching the right record, so it is worth a quick glance to confirm the year and authors before you trust it. For a published journal article or a preprint with a DOI, this is the fastest way to a correct reference.

• A DOI resolves to one canonical CrossRef record — no ambiguity
• Author list, year, volume/issue/pages, and journal come from the registry
• Title lookup is supported when you don't have the DOI — verify the match
• Works for journal articles and DOI-registered preprints

Every format you actually need

Different fields expect different styles, so the tool gives you the common ones side by side. APA and Chicago cover most of the social sciences and humanities; MLA covers the humanities; Vancouver is the numbered style used across medicine and the life sciences. Switching styles reformats the same record instantly — no re-entry.

For your reference manager, BibTeX is the standard for LaTeX and Overleaf workflows, and RIS imports cleanly into Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote. Download the file and your library picks up the full structured record, not just a formatted string.

• APA / MLA / Chicago — social sciences and humanities
• Vancouver — the numbered style for medicine and life sciences
• BibTeX (.bib) — LaTeX / Overleaf
• RIS (.ris) — Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote

Private by design

There is no account, no paywall, and no ad wall. We fetch the public bibliographic metadata for the DOI or title you enter and format it; we do not build a library on our servers, sell your reading list, or ask you to sign in to copy a citation. If you close the tab, nothing about your session persists with us.

That is a deliberate contrast with citation sites that gate exports behind a signup or monetise your reference history. Here the tool is a utility, not a funnel.

• No signup, no account, no ads
• We don't store your citations or build a server-side library
• Only the public metadata for what you look up is fetched

When to use it — and its limits

Reach for this when you have a DOI (or a findable title) and want a correct, properly formatted reference in seconds, or a clean .bib/.ris to drop into your manager. That covers the large majority of citations in a typical paper.

Where a dedicated, full reference manager still serves you better: citing books, book chapters, websites, datasets, or grey literature that has no DOI; managing a large library with notes and PDFs; or generating a full numbered bibliography with in-text citation insertion inside your word processor. We are honest that this is a fast single-reference formatter, not a replacement for Zotero or EndNote as a library — which is exactly why we export to them.

• Best for: a DOI'd journal article or preprint you need to cite now
• Also good: a quick .bib/.ris to import into your manager
• Reach for a full manager for: books, websites, datasets, no-DOI sources, big libraries
• Always sanity-check author initials and page ranges against the original

Frequently asked questions