Paste a DOI, ISBN, link or PDF. Get an APA 7th edition reference checked against real databases.
Your formatted reference will appear here, with the database record it came from.
Most free citation generators are free until you try to export, or they pad the page with advertising until the tool is hard to use. This one stays free the whole way through, and every reference traces back to a source that actually exists.
Retrieved, not generated
Every reference comes from a CrossRef, OpenAlex, OpenLibrary or Google Books record. Nothing is written by a language model.
Unconfirmed sources are flagged
When a source cannot be matched, you are told so. You never get a plausible reference to something that does not exist.
Free with no account
No paywall, no credits, no export limit, no email, no advertising. Copy your reference and go.
14 styles configured and backed by the full CSL library, so a style outside this list can still be produced.
The generator takes whatever identifier you already have. Each entry point below is tuned for one kind of input.
Journal article
Smith, J. A., & Jones, B. C. (2024). Working memory under time pressure. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 36(2), 118–134. https://doi.org/10.1000/example
Book
Alvarez, M. (2023). Learning in noisy classrooms (2nd ed.). Rowan Press.
Chapter in an edited book
Okafor, N. (2022). Attention and fatigue. In L. Berg (Ed.), Handbook of applied cognition (pp. 55–78). Meridian.
APA uses an author-date system. The in-text citation carries the author surname and the year of publication, and a page number when you quote directly. The reference list at the end is alphabetised by author surname and uses a hanging indent.
(Smith & Jones, 2024, p. 42)
Citing a website in APA is the case students get wrong most often. APA 7 wants the author (which may be an organisation), the full date, the page title in sentence case and italics, the name of the site, and the URL. If no date is given, use (n.d.). A retrieval date is only added when the page is expected to change, such as a wiki or a live statistics dashboard.
World Health Organization. (2024, March 11). Air quality and health. https://www.who.int/example
Yes. There is no paywall, no credit system, no export limit and no account. You can generate as many APA references as you need and copy them out immediately.
Yes, output follows APA 7th edition, which has been the current version since 2019. If your department still requires APA 6, check the publisher and author formatting carefully, because the two editions differ in several places.
Yes. You can paste a URL, an ISBN or a title. Books are matched through OpenLibrary and Google Books, which cover material CrossRef does not.
APA treats a chatbot response as software output: give the company as author, the year, the model name and version, and the URL. Because the conversation is not retrievable by your reader, most instructors also want the prompt and reply reproduced in an appendix.
It tells you rather than guessing. Grey literature, book chapters and non-English journals are frequently missing from open databases; in that case enter the details manually and the formatting is still applied for you.