My first attempt at a citation converter was a pile of regular expressions. Find the year, move it, swap the punctuation. It worked on the three examples I tested and fell apart on the fourth - a chapter in an edited volume, with an 'et al.' and a DOI. Citation styles aren't string templates you can shuffle. They're different serializations of the same structured record.
That's the real problem, and it's what CiteFormat addresses. Paste a reference in a common style, pick a target - APA 7, GB/T 7714, BibTeX, or MLA - and get a clean, copy-ready citation.
Parse first, then serialize
The right mental model is two stages. First, parse the reference into fields: authors, year, title, container (journal or book), volume, issue, pages, publisher, DOI. Second, serialize those fields according to the target style's rules. APA 7, MLA, and GB/T 7714 differ in field order, punctuation, capitalization, how many authors before 'et al.', and where the year sits. BibTeX is a different thing again - it's a structured entry with a key and a type, not a formatted sentence.
Once you have the fields, conversion is mostly deterministic: take the same record, emit it through a different serializer. Find-and-replace fails because it operates on the rendered string, where a comma might be a field separator or part of a title, and a year might appear twice. Parsing into fields removes that ambiguity. The 'APA 7 / GB/T 7714 / BibTeX / MLA' feature is exactly those four targets, and 'Copy-ready output' is the serialization step - the result is meant to be pasted straight into a bibliography.
The boundary: it reformats, it doesn't look things up
This is the honest limit I'd state up front. CiteFormat reformats a reference you give it. It doesn't fetch metadata from a DOI, verify that the paper exists, check that the page numbers are right, or confirm the author list. If the input is missing a volume, the output won't conjure one. Garbage in, garbage out, dressed up in the correct punctuation.
That's not a shortcoming I can paper over with a cleverer model, because it's a scope decision. A tool that silently 'fixed' a citation by guessing a missing field would be worse than one that leaves the gap visible - you'd have a clean-looking reference that's wrong. I'd rather the output be faithful to the input so you can see what still needs checking. So treat the result as a formatting pass, not a fact-check. Compare it against your style guide before you submit. It's decision-support for bibliography formatting, not a reference manager, a metadata lookup service, or a verification of the source.
No login, and a batch mode that isn't here yet
Two small decisions are worth naming. 'No login' is deliberate: converting a reference is a one-off task, and gating it behind an account adds friction for no benefit. You paste, you pick a target, you copy.
The feature list also says 'Batch (soon)', and I want to be accurate about that rather than oversell it. Batch conversion is planned, not present. Today the flow is one reference at a time. I'd rather say that plainly than imply a capability that isn't shipping yet. If you're converting a whole bibliography in one go right now, this isn't the tool for that job yet.
What the converter is and isn't
CiteFormat takes a reference in a common style and returns a clean, copy-ready version in APA 7, GB/T 7714, BibTeX, or MLA, with no login. That's the declared scope. It doesn't manage a library, deduplicate entries, fetch records, or validate the underlying facts. Used for the mechanical part - getting one reference into the right shape - it saves fiddly punctuation work. Used as an authority on whether a citation is correct, it's the wrong tool, because correctness lives in the source data, not in the formatting.
FAQ
Which styles can I convert between?
Paste a reference in a common style and pick APA 7, GB/T 7714, BibTeX, or MLA as the target.
Does it look up or verify the paper?
No. It reformats the reference you provide. It doesn't fetch metadata, check that the paper exists, or fix missing fields.
Do I need an account?
No. There's no login. You paste a reference, choose a target, and copy the output.
Can I convert a whole bibliography at once?
Not yet. Batch is listed as coming soon; the current flow handles one reference at a time.
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