Citation generator
Every field taken from the publisher's record, then formatted. Nothing is composed.
Where the reference comes from
A DOI goes to CrossRef, the registry most journal publishers deposit their metadata with, and the record that comes back supplies the authors, the year, the title and the journal. A title goes to OpenAlex instead, which indexes published works and matches on the title and the author list. Either way the fields are retrieved and then formatted. Nothing about the work is composed.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Ask a chatbot for a reference and it produces one the way it produces any other sentence, by predicting a plausible sequence, so the surname, the volume number and the DOI suffix all look exactly right and may correspond to nothing at all. This page cannot do that, because it has no way to write a reference for a record it did not receive. If the lookup finds nothing, it says so.
The formatter here is the same one CiteOwl uses to build the bibliography of an exported document, so a reference generated on this page comes out identical to one in a finished paper.
Picking a style
The seven styles differ in punctuation and in what they put first, not in the facts. APA and Harvard lead with the author and the year, which suits writing where the date of a finding carries weight. MLA puts the title in quotation marks and drops the year to the end. Chicago is common in history and the humanities. IEEE and Vancouver number references in the order they appear, which is why you see [1] in engineering and medical papers rather than a name. Numbered is the plainest of them, a bracketed index and the title, for drafts that have not settled on a house style yet.
Switch the style and the reference is rebuilt from the same record, so nothing about the work changes. Use whichever your department asks for, and if the guidance is a house style with local quirks, treat the output as the correct facts in roughly the right shape and adjust the punctuation.
Check it before you paste it
Registry metadata is uneven. Some publishers deposit every author, some stop at three. Some abbreviate the journal name, some leave the issue number out entirely, and older records are thinner than recent ones. Compare the generated reference against the article's own page and correct anything the publisher got wrong, particularly page numbers and the issue, which are the fields most often missing.
Books, book chapters outside the indexed collections, reports, news articles, datasets and web pages are not here at all, and have to be written out by hand from your style guide. And a correctly formatted reference is still only correct formatting: it says nothing about whether the paper supports the sentence you attached it to. If your list came out of a chatbot, format is the least of the problem, so run the whole thing through the citation checker first and read why the references were invented in the first place.
References that build themselves as you write
CiteOwl registers every source it retrieves and keeps the bibliography in step with the draft, in whichever style you set. Every edit arrives as a diff you can reject.
Start writing
