Citations look simple until you try to automate them. One misplaced full stop and a marker circles it in red. A student typing 100–105 should not get 100–05. Three authors mean et al. in one style and a full list in another.
We built the free Citation Generator at Utility Tools Lab to handle those details. It produces APA 7, MLA 9 and Chicago citations for the four source types students cite most: books, journal articles, websites and newspaper articles. Next to each entry it shows the matching in-text citation or footnote, ready to copy.
Here's how it works, and where the interesting edge cases are.
One input, three styles
You type authors one per line as Last, First, and fill in the title, date, container and any other fields. Then you switch styles and the output rebuilds.
Take the built-in sample, a two-author journal article. In APA 7 it becomes:
Walker, O., & Matthews, D. (2020). Sleep duration and academic performance in undergraduate students. Journal of Sleep Research, 29(3), 123–145. https://doi.org/10.1111/jsr.12945
and the in-text citation reads (Walker & Matthews, 2020).
Switch to MLA 9 and it becomes a Works Cited entry with a shorter page range. Switch to Chicago and the second output box stops being a parenthetical citation and turns into a numbered first footnote:
- Olivia Walker and Daniel Matthews, "Sleep duration and academic performance in undergraduate students," Journal of Sleep Research 29, no. 3 (2020): 123–45.
Same data, three different shapes. That's the core of the problem.
The edge cases
Author names
Each style treats names differently:
- APA reduces given names to initials and joins the last author with an ampersand.
- MLA reverses only the first author's name and joins with and.
- Chicago also reverses only the first name and uses and.
et al. kicks in at different points too: three or more authors in MLA, four or more in Chicago, and twenty-one or more in APA. If you were writing this as a function, you'd end up with a small table of thresholds per style, plus the join logic for each.
Dates
A date typed as 2020, March 15 is reshaped per style:
- APA:
2020, March 15 - MLA:
15 Mar. 2020 - Chicago:
March 15, 2020
If the year is blank, every style falls back to n.d. (no date).
Page ranges
This is my favourite one. MLA and Chicago shorten a range when the numbers share a prefix, so 123–145 becomes 123–45. But the rule isn't "drop the shared digits." The kept suffix has to be at least two digits, so 100–105 stays in full instead of collapsing to 100–05, which would look like a typo. APA never shortens anything.
Ranges also use a proper en dash, not a hyphen. The tool caps shortening at 9,999 per side, and anything larger stays exactly as typed.
Validation
Some inputs are refused rather than guessed. A journal or newspaper article without a container returns a clear message ("Journal articles need a journal name"), and websites require a URL.
What each field does
-
Authors: one per line as
Last, First - Title: italicised for books (and for webpages in APA), quoted for articles and chapters
- Year / date: a bare year for books and journals, a full date for websites and newspapers
- Container: publisher, journal name, site name or newspaper name. Its label changes with the source type
- Volume, issue, pages: journal fields
- URL / DOI: appended at the end of every style
- Date accessed: websites only, written out by MLA and Chicago
One honest limitation
The copy buttons output plain text, so italics don't survive a paste. After copying, re-italicise journal and book titles in your document. The tool reminds you of this under the output.
Try it
Open the Citation Generator, press Load Sample, and flip between APA, MLA and Chicago to see the same source rebuild in each style. If you need word and keyword checks for the paper itself, the Word Counter and Keyword Density tools sit nearby, and the GPA Calculator is in the same Study & Learning category.
Which citation style gives you the most trouble? And if you've ever written a formatter for one of them, which edge case surprised you most?
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