Citation formatting support

Check your citations before you hand them in.

We compare our citations with the worked examples in the official style guides, and a style that fails our checks is not offered. Even so, a citation can look right and still have a detail wrong. For work that counts, compare your list with your style guide, or ask your instructor or publisher.

A sheet with a reference on it lies against an open style manual, a ruler under the line being checked. That line and the matching line in the manual are highlighted in orange.

In every style

  • Two works by the same author in the same year get a letter after the year, such as 2024a and 2024b, in the reference list and in the text. APA, Chicago author-date and Cite Them Right Harvard all do this. A few author-date styles, such as Elsevier Harvard, print the plain year, so add the letters yourself.
  • We never add a name or an initial to tell two citations apart. If two authors share a surname and a year, or two teams both shorten to the same “et al.”, their citations in the text look the same. Add an initial or a second name yourself.
  • A source’s card gives its citation on its own. To cite several sources at once, such as (Smith, 2020; Jones, 2021) or [1–3], put them in one place on the Writing order tab, which prints them together as your style does.
  • Where a style puts a long dash in place of a repeated author’s name, as MLA does, we print the name in full each time.
  • Some details have no box on the form yet, such as a book’s series or the date a web page was archived, so no style can print them. Add them by hand if your style asks for them. A translator can be entered for a book, a book chapter and a classic work.
  • A podcast’s host goes in the Host/Producer box, which counts as the author. So APA does not add “(Host)” and MLA does not add “hosted by”. Add those words yourself if you need them.
  • Styles such as MLA and Chicago capitalize the main words of a title. A word with a full stop inside it, such as node.js or a web address, and a title in another language are left as you typed them, so type them as they should print.
  • To set part of a title in italics, such as the name of a species, type <i> before it and </i> after it. <b>, <sub> and <sup> work the same way for bold, lowered and raised text. In a title your style already sets in italics, the part you marked is set upright, as style guides ask.

Style by style

Some points below are where we follow a style’s official guide rather than what other citation tools print, so your citations can differ from theirs on purpose. The rest are things to correct by hand.

APA

  • A personal communication, such as an email or a conversation, is cited in the text only, as the APA manual says, so it has no entry in your reference list. Your citation list shows its in-text citation. A letter kept in an archive, given with the archive or a link, keeps its entry.
  • A treaty is listed by its name, the date it was signed and a link, as the APA manual does: United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, November 20, 1989, followed by the link.
  • An organisation that wrote and published a source is named once, as the author, and a web page whose site is its author leaves the site out.
  • A date that arrived in words from an import or a lookup, such as “Spring 2022”, can print twice in the citation of a web page or a document: (Spring 2022, Spring 2022). Delete the repeat.

MLA

  • A page range is joined with a hyphen and shortened, as the MLA Handbook does: 284-87.
  • A web address is printed without “https://”. A DOI keeps its “https://doi.org/”.
  • One volume of a book, entered under its author or its editor, keeps its volume number, such as “Vol. 1”.
  • A review names the work it reviews and its author after a comma, as the MLA Handbook does: Review of The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
  • A speech gives the day it was delivered after the event: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 28 Aug. 1963, Washington, D.C.
  • A source an organisation wrote and published starts with its title, and the organisation is named once, as the publisher: MLA Handbook. 9th ed., Modern Language Association of America, 2021. The in-text citation gives the title.

Chicago

  • Chicago leaves some kinds of source out of the bibliography and cites them only in the note or the text: a personal communication and, depending on the edition, a social media post, a dictionary entry or a speech. Your citation list shows its note or in-text citation, marked “Cited in the notes only” or “Cited in the text only”.
  • Chicago notes cites in footnotes. See footnote styles for what we give you and what you add.

Harvard

  • Cite Them Right writes an edition as “2nd edn”, as British styles do.
  • Elsevier Harvard prints the plain year for two works by one author in one year. Add “a” and “b” yourself.
  • In Cite Them Right, cases, legislation, bills, regulations and treaties print without their citation numbers, such as 347 U.S. 483 or 42 U.S.C. § 12101. Add them by hand, or use a legal style for legal work.

Vancouver

  • A page range is joined with a hyphen and shortened, as in the National Library of Medicine’s samples: 284-7.
  • June, July and September are shortened to “Jun”, “Jul” and “Sep”.
  • Each part of a hyphenated first name gets an initial, so Hiu-fai Fong is “Fong HF”.

IEEE

  • June, July and September are shortened to “Jun.”, “Jul.” and “Sep.”, as in the IEEE Reference Guide.

Legal styles: AGLC, OSCOLA and Bluebook

  • Type courts and law reports as abbreviations, such as HCA or CLR, in the Court and Reporter boxes. For legislation, put the jurisdiction’s abbreviation, such as Cth or Vic, in the Jurisdiction box.
  • Give an Act’s year once, in its name or in Date Enacted. Typed in both, it prints twice.
  • AGLC writes an edition as “2nd ed”, as the Guide does. OSCOLA writes “2nd edn”.
  • An AGLC bibliography is divided under the Guide’s lettered headings: A Articles/Books/Reports, B Cases, C Legislation, D Treaties, E Other. A heading with nothing under it is left out, and the letters after it move up.
  • For a law report series arranged by year, AGLC puts the year in square brackets, as in [1976] 1 NSWLR 1. A volume in the Volume box gives round brackets instead, so type the volume in the Reporter box before the abbreviation (“1 NSWLR”) and leave Volume empty.
  • AGLC has no layout of its own for the Regulation and Hearing types. Enter a regulation as Legislation, which prints correctly, and check a parliamentary debate (Hansard) against the Guide.
  • Bluebook Law Review has footnotes and no bibliography, so it cannot be copied as a bibliography or exported to PDF, Word or text. BibTeX, RIS and the file for Pandoc and Quarto still export.

Footnote styles

AGLC, OSCOLA and Chicago notes cite sources in numbered footnotes rather than in brackets in your text.

  • We give each source’s first footnote, its later short footnote and its Ibid. Your citation list shows all three under each citation, each with its own Copy, while its Footnote switch is on, as it is to begin with.
  • Use Ibid when the footnote just before cites only this source. Chicago’s 18th edition prefers the short footnote there, so the two are shown as one.
  • AGLC and OSCOLA put the number of the footnote where you first cited a source into later ones, as in “(n 5)” or “above n 5”. Type that number into the gap the later footnote leaves for it on the citation.
  • List your footnotes in order on the Writing order page of your project, and it works out which footnotes are short, where Ibid goes and the number in “(n 5)” for you. Where a footnote of your paper cites nothing from your list, give the next one your paper’s own number, so the numbers stay true. A footnote you add, move or remove above a number you typed moves that number, and every one typed below it, on or back by one, as Word renumbers footnotes. If adding, moving or removing a footnote changes others you have copied, the page marks them to copy again.
  • In a style that is all footnotes, such as Bluebook Law Review, each citation in your list is its first footnote, and the Later footnotes switch shows the other two.
  • A pinpoint, the page or paragraph you point to, belongs to one footnote and not to the source. Type it in the page box on the citation, then copy.
  • In AGLC 4th edition, choose what your pinpoint is, and it is written as the Guide writes it: s 37 for a section and ss 37–8 for more than one, ch 4 for a chapter, pt 2 for a part, n 5 for a footnote, [12] for a paragraph of a judgment or a book, para 12 for a paragraph of an Act, a bill or a treaty, and a page number on its own. Two numbers joined by a hyphen print as a span: 5-7 prints as ss 5–7. A tax Act section, whose number has a hyphen of its own, takes its label typed with it: s 8-1.
  • A later footnote names a source by a short title, as in “Binder and Kidder, Channels of Student Activism, 125”. Type it in the Short title box on the citation form. Leave the box empty and the full title is used, however long it is.
  • If your paper uses endnotes, the same forms serve them.
  • Exports hold the bibliography only, and a style that is all footnotes has none. Copy footnotes from your citation list as you need them.
  • Editing a citation’s formatted text changes its bibliography entry, not its footnote.

Exports

  • A source your style leaves out of the bibliography is left out of PDF, Word and text exports and of Copy Bibliography. BibTeX, RIS and the file for Pandoc and Quarto keep it, because they carry the details of your sources rather than the formatted list.
  • If a citation could not be printed in your style, its row in your list says so, and it is left out of PDF, Word and text exports and of Copy Bibliography. Check its details, or tell us about it.
  • A PDF prints the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, accents included. It cannot print Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai or the scripts of India, and it does not set Arabic or Hebrew from right to left. The export menu tells you when your list has letters a PDF cannot print. A Word export keeps them all.

Source types

  • Choose Journal Article, Magazine Article or Newspaper Article for an article in one of those. Article is for any other kind, and some styles print it as a preprint.
  • Classic Work, Collection, Document, Event, Hearing, Performance, Periodical, Regulation, Software and Standard are newer types, and many styles have no layout of their own for them. We test them in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver and IEEE. In other styles, check them with extra care.

How we check

We compare our citations with the worked examples in the official guides for the most-used styles, among them APA, MLA, Chicago, Vancouver, IEEE, AGLC and OSCOLA, and with a wider set of test sources in English, German and French. We update a style only after checking what the update changes, and a style that fails our checks is not offered when you choose one. Passing these checks does not prove that every citation is right, which is why this page lists what to look at.

Found something we print wrongly? Tell us, with the source, the style and what you expected.