How to use the Citation Generator
- 1. Choose source typeBook, journal article or web page. The form shows only the fields that type needs.
- 2. Enter the detailsAuthors one per line, title, year and the rest. Leave optional fields blank.
- 3. Copy your citationCopy the selected style, or use the table of all five styles.
Example: a journal or conference paper
The sample is the 2017 paper by Vaswani, Shazeer and Parmar. In APA 7 it becomes: Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., & Parmar, N. (2017). Attention is all you need. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30, 5998–6008. In IEEE, which most engineering colleges in India prefer, the same details give: A. Vaswani, N. Shazeer, and N. Parmar, "Attention is all you need," Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 30, pp. 5998–6008, 2017.
How each style handles authors
- APA 7: surname and initials, with an ampersand before the last author, up to 20 authors.
- MLA 9: the first author is reversed; three or more authors become "et al."
- IEEE: initials first; more than six authors become the first author plus "et al."
- Harvard: surname and initials without spaces, joined with "and".
- Chicago author-date: the first author reversed, the rest in normal order, with the year straight after the names.
You can type names as "First Last" or "Last, First"; use the comma form for surnames of more than one word.
What to check yourself
Capitalisation is the most common mistake. APA wants sentence case for article and book titles (only the first word and proper nouns capitalised), while MLA and Chicago want title case, so edit the title before you switch styles. Universities sometimes have their own variant of Harvard, so follow your department's guide where it differs. The generator doesn't look anything up online; it only formats what you enter, so details like the DOI must come from the source.
Frequently asked questions
Which style should I use for an engineering report?
IEEE is the most common for engineering and computer science in India, but follow what your department specifies.
Can it cite a website without an author?
Yes. Leave authors blank; the style puts the site or title first as it should.
Does it look up a DOI for me?
No. It formats the details you enter and doesn't connect to any database.
Is the citation generator free?
Yes, completely. You can type in everything and use the citation generator with no sign-up. When you ask for the result the first time, we ask for your name and WhatsApp number once; after that the citation generator and every other Uncodemy tool open straight away.