Free Academic Citation Generator

Paste a DOI (e.g., 10.1038/s41586-024-00001-2), an ISBN (10 or 13 digit), a PMID, a doi.org URL, or a publisher article URL — or search by paper title, author name, or keywords. CiteMe looks for a source record first, shows its provenance, and then formats the returned metadata in your chosen style. No account is required.

CiteMe searches scholarly indexes and identifier registries before formatting a citation. Results name the recorded metadata source; generated fallback, webpage metadata, and incomplete records are marked as needing review. DOI presence is shown separately from record existence.

The generator supports 60 curated styles, including APA 7th edition, MLA 9th edition, Chicago 17th edition (author-date and notes-bibliography), Harvard (Cite Them Right), Vancouver (ICMJE), IEEE, ABNT NBR 6023, AMA, Turabian, OSCOLA, MHRA, ACS, ASA, AIP, APSA, Bluebook, CSE, and Nature. Over 10,000 further CSL styles (journal-specific formats) are available on demand for niche publications.

Yes. Copy the formatted citation directly, export BibTeX for LaTeX / Overleaf, or RIS for reference managers. If you already have a DOI, the DOI to Citation tool is a faster route. To verify references before submission, use the Reference Checker.

ZoteroBib is excellent for generating citations from an identifier you already have (DOI, ISBN, PMID) but does not support topic search. MyBib and Scribbr rely primarily on web scraping, which can miss metadata on paywalled journal pages, non-English sources, and malformed publisher URLs. CiteMe queries real scholarly APIs first and falls back to structured page metadata only when needed — this reduces errors on difficult sources like pre-prints, conference proceedings, and theses.

Yes. Topic search is the fastest way to cite a paper when you only know the title. Type the paper title (or a unique phrase from the abstract) and CiteMe searches OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar, ranks results by relevance, and lets you pick the correct match. This is especially useful for pre-prints, older articles, and book chapters that may not have easily-searchable DOIs.

Yes. Paste a PMID (e.g., 38123456), a PMC ID (e.g., PMC4031825), or a PubMed URL and CiteMe pulls the biomedical metadata and formats it in Vancouver, AMA, Harvard, or APA. For biomedical-specific workflows, the dedicated Vancouver PubMed generator and PMID-to-citation tool are optimized for medical and nursing students.