Citation formatting support

Formatting is automated, but it still needs review.

We test citation formatting against representative references and hide styles that fail our release checks. A citation rendering without an error does not prove that every detail is correct. Compare important work with your instructor, publisher, or official style guide.

What is validated

The style and language catalogues we ship are frozen at a specific, reviewed version and are checked before every test run and release. What we validate is a tested subset of what those styles can express, not a claim that every style renders every reference perfectly.

Source types

In addition to the standard source types, we accept ten newer type names as tested extensions: classic, collection, document, event, hearing, performance, periodical, regulation, software, and standard. The generic article type is supported as a fallback and is not treated as a journal article automatically.

Known limitations

  • Same-author, same-year disambiguation can omit year suffixes such as “a” and “b”.
  • Stateful citation clusters, ibid behavior, note distance, grouping, and collapse are not fully supported.
  • Chicago 16th-edition page ranges are shortened using the older Chicago contraction rule.
  • Styles that shorten page ranges to their final digits (including MLA) can shorten them incorrectly. For example, pages 1496–1500 can appear as 1496-00. Check page ranges in your final reference list.
  • Styles that replace repeated author names with a dash are shown with the full names instead.
  • Some punctuation, localized terms, creator roles, and bibliography sort details differ from independent reference output; reviewed examples are locked as release tests.
  • British styles label an edition “2nd edn”. Australian legal citation asks for “2nd ed”, so change it by hand if you use AGLC.

Footnote styles

Styles such as AGLC, OSCOLA, and Chicago notes cite sources in numbered footnotes rather than in brackets in your text. For these styles we show the full first reference for every source, which is what you paste into your first footnote for it.

  • Short later forms such as “ibid”, “(n 5)”, and “above n 5” are not generated, because they depend on where each footnote sits in your document. For AGLC we show the shape a later footnote should take so you can write it yourself.
  • Pinpoints, such as the page or paragraph you are pointing at, belong to a single footnote rather than to the source, so add them as you write.
  • Exports contain the bibliography. Copy footnotes from the citation list as you need them.
  • An AGLC bibliography comes out as one list in the right order, without the lettered A, B, C section headings.
  • For legal sources, enter courts and reporters as abbreviations, such as HCA or CLR, and put the jurisdiction abbreviation, such as Cth or Vic, in the Jurisdiction field.

What we check

Release checks cover APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, and Vancouver with personal and organization names, detailed dates, identifiers, multiple locales, the accepted later type names, and the generic article fallback. Unsupported style constructs are quarantined rather than offered for new projects.