Bibliography Formatter

What it does

A bibliography is the alphabetized list of all sources cited in an academic paper, formatted in one of the major citation styles. The four dominant styles in English-language academic writing — APA 7th edition (American Psychological Association, most common in social sciences and psychology), MLA 9th edition (Modern Language Association, most common in humanities), Chicago 17th edition (most common in history and fine arts, available in author-date and notes-bibliography variants), and Harvard (the British/Commonwealth equivalent of author-date Chicago, common in UK and Australian universities) — each have subtly different rules for capitalization, italicization, punctuation, author-name ordering, date format, and DOI/URL handling. Getting it wrong is the most-flagged formatting error on submitted papers.

The formatter takes a list of sources (books, journal articles, websites, newspapers, conference papers, dissertations, edited volumes, online videos, podcasts) and formats each according to the rules of your chosen style, then alphabetizes by first author's last name with proper hanging indents (every line after the first indented) and the conventions for multi-author works (et al rules differ: APA uses et al. for 3+ authors in 7th edition, MLA for 3+, Chicago for 4+ and spells out 1-3, Harvard varies by institution).

Style-specific quirks worth knowing: APA 7 uses sentence-case for article titles (capitalize first word and proper nouns only) but title-case for journal names (capitalize all major words), italicizes journal name and volume number but NOT issue number; includes DOI as a clickable URL (https://doi.org/10.xxxx/yyyy). MLA 9 uses title-case throughout, italicizes larger work titles (book, journal name) and quotes article/chapter titles, omits DOI in favor of the URL or accessing information. Chicago author-date uses numerical years without parentheses in the bibliography. Harvard varies subtly by institution — always check your school's published style guide before submitting, because “Harvard” is a family of related styles, not a single one.

How to use it

1. Click Add Source for each citation; pick the source type (book, journal, website, etc.).
2. Fill in the fields — author(s), year, title, publisher/journal, volume, issue, pages, DOI/URL.
3. Pick your target style — APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 17, or Harvard.
4. Click Format — sources are sorted alphabetically by author and formatted with hanging indents.
5. Copy or download the bibliography. Paste into your paper at the end as a “References” (APA), “Works Cited” (MLA), or “Bibliography” (Chicago) section.

When to use this tool

• Writing academic papers, theses, dissertations, or research reports.
• Formatting a list of sources for a course assignment requiring a specific style.
• Standardizing citations across a multi-author paper where contributors used inconsistent styles.
• Building a literature review with 20+ sources where manual formatting becomes error-prone.
• Preparing a CV publications list in a consistent academic style.

When not to use it

• Quick informal references in a blog post or memo — full citation styles are overkill.
• Highly specialized styles (AMA medical, IEEE engineering, ACS chemistry, Bluebook legal, AAA anthropology) — use a discipline-specific tool.
• When your school requires a specific in-house variant — always check the style guide for any deviations from standard.
• AI-generated source lists — verify each citation actually exists; LLMs hallucinate plausible-but-fictional papers and DOIs.

Common use cases

• Verifying a number or output before passing it on
• Quick use during a typical workday
• Pre-decision sanity-check on inputs and outputs
• Educational use — demonstrating the underlying concept