TOOLS · CITATION GENERATOR
Free citation generator.
Paste a DOI and get the reference in APA, MLA, Chicago or eleven other styles, or as BibTeX or RIS for a reference manager. It is free, needs no account, and runs in your browser.
No DOI? Find the work by its title
Reference
In-text citation
Your list
Lookups go from your browser straight to Crossref or DataCite, the registries that issue DOIs; nothing is sent to Docr’d. Your list is saved in this browser only.
How to cite with a DOI
A DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a permanent ID given to a journal article, book, chapter, conference paper, dataset or piece of software. It starts with 10., then a number, a slash, and the rest: 10.1038/nature14539. The registry that issued it keeps the work’s author, title, date and publication details, which is what a citation needs.
- Find the DOI. It is usually printed on the first page of a PDF, near the abstract on the publisher’s page, or in the link:
https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539. Paste the whole link if that is easier. - Choose a style. Your instructor, journal or department says which one; APA is selected to start.
- Click Cite. The reference and the matching in-text citation appear, and the work is added to your list.
- Copy one citation, or keep adding works and copy the whole list at the end. Pasted into a word processor, italics come along.
No DOI to hand? Open Find the work by its title above the results, type the title, and pick the right match from Crossref.
What each style looks like
The same article, Deep learning by LeCun, Bengio and Hinton (10.1038/nature14539), as this tool formats it:
| APA 7 | LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning. Nature, 521(7553), 436–444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539 |
|---|---|
| MLA 9 | LeCun, Yann, et al. “Deep Learning.” Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, May 2015, pp. 436–44, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539. |
| Chicago | LeCun, Yann, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton. 2015. “Deep Learning.” Nature 521 (7553): 436–44. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539. |
| Harvard | LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y. and Hinton, G. (2015) “Deep learning,” Nature, 521(7553), pp. 436–444. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539. |
| IEEE | [1] Y. LeCun, Y. Bengio, and G. Hinton, “Deep learning,” Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, pp. 436–444, May 2015, doi: 10.1038/nature14539. |
| Vancouver | 1. LeCun Y, Bengio Y, Hinton G. Deep learning. Nature. 2015 May 27;521(7553):436–44. doi:10.1038/nature14539 |
Author-date styles (APA, Chicago author-date, Harvard, ASA) cite in the text by name and year, like (LeCun et al., 2015), and list references alphabetically. Numbered styles (IEEE, Vancouver, AMA, ACS, AIP, ASME, Nature, CSE) cite by number in the order works first appear. MLA cites by author and page. Chicago’s notes and bibliography style puts the citation in a footnote. The tool also offers Chicago notes, AMA 11, ACS, AIP, ASME, ASA, Nature and CSE.
For more on one style, see the APA, MLA and Chicago pages.
BibTeX for LaTeX
Choose BibTeX in the style menu to get an entry for a .bib file, with a citation key built from the first author, year and first title word:
@article{lecun2015deep,
title = {Deep learning},
author = {LeCun, Yann and Bengio, Yoshua and Hinton, Geoffrey},
year = {2015},
doi = {10.1038/nature14539},
issn = {0028-0836},
volume = {521},
number = {7553},
pages = {436--444},
publisher = {Springer Science and Business Media LLC},
journal = {Nature}
}
Cite it with \cite{lecun2015deep}. Download saves your whole list as citations.bib. The BibTeX generator page covers keys, entry types and BibLaTeX. RIS works the same way for Zotero, EndNote, Mendeley and most other reference managers.
Check before you submit
The tool formats whatever the publisher registered for the DOI, so a reference is only as good as that record. Look over each one before you hand it in:
- Title capitalisation. Some publishers register titles in capitals or with odd casing. APA wants sentence case for article titles; MLA and Chicago want title case, which the styles apply but cannot always get right for names, acronyms and chemical formulas.
- Missing details. Some records lack an issue, page range or publication date. Add them from the article itself.
- Page numbers in the text. MLA and quotations in APA and Chicago need the page you are citing, which no DOI record can know. Add it to the in-text citation yourself.
- Your own institution’s rules. Many departments adjust a style. When their guide and the tool disagree, follow the guide.
Questions
Is it really free?
Yes. There is no account and nothing to pay, and you can look up as many works as you like; your list holds up to 200 at a time. It is a small tool from the makers of Docr’d, a research library app.
Which DOIs work?
DOIs registered with Crossref, which covers most journal articles, books, chapters and conference papers, and with DataCite, which covers most datasets, software and repository deposits such as Zenodo and arXiv. DOIs from smaller registries, such as mEDRA, JaLC and CNKI, are not found yet.
Can I cite a book or web page without a DOI?
Not with this tool yet. It builds every citation from a registry record, so it needs a DOI or a title Crossref can find. Many books and chapters from academic publishers do have DOIs; try searching by title.
Where is my list kept?
In your browser’s local storage, on this device only. It is never uploaded. Clearing your browser data, or Clear list, removes it.
What is sent where?
When you cite or search, your browser asks Crossref (api.crossref.org) or DataCite (api.datacite.org) directly for the record. Docr’d receives nothing: not the DOI, not the title, not your list. The styles and the citation processor are downloaded from this site the first time you use the tool.
Which style versions are these?
APA 7th edition, MLA 9th edition, Chicago 18th edition (author-date and notes-bibliography), Harvard as defined by Cite Them Right, IEEE, Vancouver as the NLM citation-sequence style, AMA 11th edition, ACS, AIP, ASME, ASA, Nature and CSE citation-sequence. They are the community-maintained styles of the Citation Style Language project, the same ones used by Zotero and many other tools.
Keep your references in a library
If you cite the same papers again and again, a citation list in a browser tab gets old. Docr’d is a research library for papers, books and standards: read and annotate PDFs, search everything you have saved, take notes that link to the page they quote, and copy citations in these same fourteen styles, or as BibTeX, CSL JSON and RIS. It can keep a .bib file up to date for LaTeX automatically. The desktop apps for macOS, Windows and Linux are free to use without an account.
Docr’d is in early access, so you may run into rough edges.
Credits
Citations are formatted by citeproc-js, (c) Frank Bennett — citeproc-js implements the Citation Style Language. It is used under the Common Public Attribution License 1.0 (license terms); the copy this page loads is its readable source, with one change from upstream pull request #276 that caches sorting macros to save memory, described in our modification notice. The styles and locale files come from the CSL project under CC BY-SA 3.0, with their authors credited in each file. Work records come from Crossref and DataCite.