Make APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard citations

How Citation Generator works

Grades and scores are arithmetic over the marks you enter. The scale is printed so a teacher or student can verify the total by hand. A mark sheet is personal data, and it stays on the device that typed it rather than in a gradebook nobody asked for.

That is the whole architecture: static files, one script, no upload endpoint to leak or log. Close the tab and the work is gone.

Why the four styles disagree

APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard all answer the same question — who wrote it, when, what is it called, and where can a reader find it — but they order and punctuate those four facts differently. APA puts the year right after the author because in the sciences the date carries weight. MLA pushes the year to the end because in the humanities the page number matters more. Chicago gives you two systems, notes or author-date, and the note form moves the whole reference into a footnote.

None of this is law. A style is a convention published by an association, and associations revise them every few years: APA moved to 7th edition in 2020, MLA to 9th in 2021. That is why the tool prints the version it follows and tells you to check your department's punctuation — a citation that is right for one course can be marked wrong in another.

Why there is no ISBN or URL lookup

Every other citation site lets you paste a URL or an ISBN and fills the form for you. That convenience has a price: the book you are citing, and often the IP address you are citing it from, goes to somebody else's server, where it becomes a record of what you are reading.

Those lookups also break. An ISBN database returns nothing for a self-published book, a university press title from the 1970s, or anything that predates the barcode. Typing six fields takes about fifteen seconds and works for every source you can hold in your hand.

What makes a citation correct

Four elements, in this order of importance: the author's name as it appears on the work, the year of the edition you actually used, the title in the capitalisation the style demands, and enough publication detail for a reader to find the same copy. A missing page range is a small problem; a missing year makes the reference unusable.

Consistency matters more than perfection. If your list is alphabetical and your in-text citations match your reference list entry for entry, a marker will read it as careful work even if one comma sits in the wrong place. The tool generates the in-text forms alongside the reference so the two cannot drift apart.

Good to know

• Works offline once loaded, including on flights and in locked-down networks.
• No file size limit beyond your device's own memory.
• Free to use, with no account and no usage counter.
• Results are produced locally, so they are not logged or shared with anyone.

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