Build a reference list in APA, MLA, Harvard or Chicago
The rules are published and the book details are free to look up, so there has never been a good reason for this to cost anything. Paste a DOI or an ISBN and the details fill themselves in. Nothing here asks you to make an account to copy your own bibliography.
APA 7, MLA 9, Harvard, and Chicago author-date
A DOI through CrossRef, or an ISBN through Open Library
Journal article, book, chapter, website, and thesis
Kept in this browser only, and never uploaded
How to use it
- Pick the style your department asks for. If you are not sure, APA is the usual default in the sciences and MLA in the humanities.
- Paste a DOI or an ISBN and press look it up, or fill the fields in by hand.
- Check what came back. Automatic lookups get authors and dates right nearly always, and titles occasionally need their capitalisation fixed.
- Add it to your list, then copy the whole bibliography out when you are done. It sorts itself alphabetically.
Questions
Why do the popular citation sites want an account now?
Because most of them were bought by companies that sell subscriptions, and the citation tool became the doorway. The formatting rules themselves are published by the APA, the MLA and the University of Chicago, and the bibliographic details come from free public catalogues, so the paywall is on the convenience rather than on anything scarce.
How accurate is the automatic lookup?
For a DOI it is very good, because CrossRef holds the publisher's own record: authors, journal, volume, issue, pages and year. The one thing worth checking every time is title capitalisation, since publishers deposit titles in all sorts of cases and APA wants sentence case while MLA wants title case.
Can I paste in a plain web link?
Not automatically, and it is worth saying why: a browser cannot read another site's page directly, so a tool that offers this is sending your link to its own server to fetch. Since nothing here has a server, a web page is filled in by hand. It is four fields.
Where is my bibliography stored?
In this browser, in local storage, on this device. It survives a refresh and it is not sent anywhere. Clearing your browser data clears it, so copy anything you need to keep.