Citation Generator
Format sources in MLA, APA, or Chicago for literary works. Supports books, short stories, poems, and journal articles.
How to use this
Type the details of the source you need to cite: author, title and year at minimum, plus the container it appeared in if you have it (the anthology, the journal, the edition), the editor or translator, the publisher and the page range. For a short story or a poem, name the collection it was printed in, because the citation is to that printing, not to the story in the abstract. For a novel, name the edition you actually read; page numbers differ between editions and your teacher will check quotations against the one you cite.
Choose the style your course requires. Literature classes in North America usually ask for MLA; psychology and the social sciences use APA; history and some humanities courses use Chicago. If the syllabus does not say, ask before you submit rather than guessing. The generator returns a works-cited entry in the chosen format, which you paste into the list at the end of the essay, and the matching in-text form for the parenthetical citation after a quotation.
Check the output against the details you typed. Capitalisation of titles, italics for a book against quotation marks for a story, and the order of names all follow rules the generator applies mechanically, so a typo in the input becomes a typo in the citation. The widget on this page is a preview: until the full version ships, the result panel shows a worked example in MLA rather than a citation built from your entry.
Important caveats
A citation generator formats what you give it. It cannot verify that the author, title or date is right, cannot find the page number you forgot to note, and cannot tell you which edition you read. Garbage in, correctly formatted garbage out. The reliable sources for those details are the copyright page of the book in your hand and the header of the journal article, not a search result.
Style manuals change. MLA's ninth edition and APA's seventh differ from the versions many older guides still describe, and individual teachers add their own house rules. If the output disagrees with your course handbook, the handbook wins. The generator covers the common source types for a literature essay, books, stories and poems in collections, journal articles and web pages; unusual sources such as recorded lectures, letters in an archive or an AI chatbot's reply need a hand-built entry, and how to cite ChatGPT walks through that last case.
Formatting a citation is the last step, not the first. It does not replace reading the source, quoting it accurately or explaining what the quotation does in your argument, and a flawless works-cited list will not rescue a paragraph that summarises when it should analyse. Every entry on the list should correspond to something you actually cited in the essay; padding a bibliography with unread sources is its own form of dishonesty, and teachers recognise it.