What is Bibliography Maker?

Bibliography Maker lets you create properly formatted citation lists for academic papers, essays, and reports. Paste a DOI or ISBN to auto-fill the details, or type them in, and get instant APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, or Vancouver citations alongside the matching in-text reference. Your bibliography stays on your device; only the DOI or ISBN you look up is sent to the public CrossRef and Open Library catalogs to fetch its details. Free to use, with one-click HTML, plain text, and BibTeX downloads.

Six citation styles cover almost any course: APA for psychology and the social sciences, MLA for English and humanities, Chicago for history, Harvard for many UK courses, IEEE for engineering and computer science, and Vancouver for medicine and the health sciences. IEEE and Vancouver number each reference in order and cite it in text as [1]. Each of six source types asks for the fields that style actually wants — books take publisher, journal articles take journal name, volume, and pages, websites take URL and access date, newspapers take publication and page, films take director and studio, and dissertations take university. Paste a DOI or ISBN to fill those fields automatically. Multiple authors go in one field separated by semicolons; the tool applies the right joining word and et al. rule per style. Sort the finished list by author, year, or source type, then export it as plain text, formatted HTML you can paste straight into Word, or BibTeX for LaTeX and reference managers like Zotero and Mendeley.

How to use

1. Pick your citation format — APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, or Vancouver — and choose the source type from book, journal article, website, newspaper, film, or dissertation.
2. Paste a DOI or ISBN to auto-fill the details from CrossRef and Open Library, or type in the source — author, title, publisher, year, URL, and any other relevant fields.
3. Click Add to build your bibliography, then copy the formatted list or download it as plain text, HTML for Word and Google Docs, or BibTeX for LaTeX, Zotero, and Mendeley.

When to use

• Building a Works Cited page for a college essay due in a few hours.
• Compiling references for a graduate thesis chapter mixing books and journal articles.
• Generating a quick reading list for a blog post or research summary.

Result

You're writing a research paper and need to cite a journal article by Smith & Johnson published in Nature in 2024. Select APA format, enter the details, and get: Smith, J., & Johnson, R. (2024). Title. Nature, 612, 45-52.

FAQ

Which citation style should I use for my paper?

Check your assignment first. Psychology, education, and most social sciences use APA. English, literature, and language papers use MLA. History, religion, and many humanities courses use Chicago/Turabian. Engineering and computer science use IEEE, and medicine and the health sciences use Vancouver. When in doubt, ask the professor.

How do I cite an author with multiple names or two authors?

Put every author into a single field, separated by semicolons — e.g. Smith, J.; Jones, B.; Lee, C. The tool then applies each style's own rule: APA inserts the serial comma plus ampersand, MLA collapses three or more authors to the first plus 'et al.', Chicago lists up to ten and uses 'and' before the last, and Harvard switches to 'et al.' from four authors. The in-text citation under each entry reflects the same logic, so you can copy both the reference and the parenthetical with a single click.

What if my source has no publication year or no author?

Leave the field blank and the citation skips that segment. For missing dates APA recommends writing n.d. (no date) in the year field. For anonymous sources, put the organization name or the title in place of an author.

Can I edit a citation after I've added it?

Not directly — the list shows the formatted output. To revise, delete the entry from the bibliography, re-enter it in the form with the corrected details, and add it again. The format updates instantly when you switch between APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, and Vancouver, and you can reorder the whole list by author, year, or source type at any time.

Does this handle in-text citations as well?

Yes — every entry now shows the matching in-text citation right under the full reference, formatted for the style you picked: APA as (Smith, 2024) with '&' for two authors and 'et al.' from three, MLA as (Smith 45) with the page when given, Chicago author-date as (Smith 2024, 45), and Harvard as (Smith, 2024, p. 45). Click the small copy icon to grab just the parenthetical, or use the full citation copy for your reference list.

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