General · Education
Citation generator.
Enter a book, journal article, or website and get a properly formatted reference-list entry plus the matching in-text (or footnote) citation — in APA 7th edition, MLA 9th edition, or Chicago 17th edition (Notes-Bibliography or Author-Date).
Inputs
Your citation
Fill the form and press Generate citation.
Quick-reference: in-text / footnote citation by author count
| Style | 1 author | 2 authors | 3+ authors |
|---|---|---|---|
| APA 7 | (Jones, 1998) | (Wegener & Petty, 1994) | (Kernis et al., 1993) |
| MLA 9 | (Wordsworth 263) | (Best and Marcus 9) | (Franck et al. 327) |
| Chicago Notes-Bib (footnote) | Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown (Pantheon Books, 2020), 45. | First Last and First Last, Title (Publisher, Year), page. | First Last, First Last, and First Last, Title (Publisher, Year), page. |
| Chicago Author-Date | (Yu 2020, 45) | (Binder and Kidder 2022, 117–18) | (Dittmar et al. 2023, 480) |
APA switches to "et al." at three or more authors for the in-text citation only — the reference-list entry still spells out every author up to 20. MLA and Chicago drop to the first author + "et al." for both the in-text/footnote form and (at 3+ for MLA, 4+ for Chicago) the reference entry itself.
Sources, and when they were checked
Checked on 29 September 2026, directly against the two style guides that publish free quick-reference examples rather than from memory:
- Purdue OWL — APA Style Guide (7th ed.) — in-text citation rules and reference-list examples for one, two, and three+ authors, and for books, journal articles, and webpages
- Purdue OWL — MLA Style Guide (9th ed.) — Works Cited core-elements template, author-page in-text format, and book/webpage examples
- The Chicago Manual of Style — Citation Quick Guide — the official CMOS book, journal-article, and webpage examples for both Notes-Bibliography and Author-Date, 17th edition
This tool applies those verified example formats mechanically to whatever you type in. It doesn't fetch or verify the source you're citing itself (title, year, publisher, page numbers) — that accuracy is still on you. Compound last names, corporate authors with unusual capitalization, and sources with 21+ authors (APA) or 4+ (MLA/Chicago) may need a manual tweak after generating.