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Three editions are current right now: MLA 9 (2021), APA 7 (2020) and Chicago 18 (2024). Draft an entry below — then read what each style’s own documentation says the shape should be, and which three details generated entries usually get wrong.
Last updated 7 October 2026
Leave it empty for an unsigned work and the entry begins with the title.
A works-cited entry that is right in one edition of a style manual can be wrong in the next one, so the first thing worth knowing is which edition you are being marked against. As of 1 October 2026, three editions are current:
Each of those came from the style's own documentation rather than from a summary. The MLA Style Center says of the handbook: “Published in April 2021, the ninth edition of the MLA Handbook works as both a textbook and a reference guide.” MLA also publishes the entry you should use when citing the handbook itself, which settles the publisher and year in its own format: “MLA Handbook. 9th ed., Modern Language Association of America, 2021.”
For APA, the reference-examples page states that “More than 100 reference examples and their corresponding in-text citations are presented in the seventh edition Publication Manual”, and the introduction APA distributes for that manual carries the line “Copyright 2020 by the American Psychological Association”.
For Chicago, the citation quick guide on the manual's own site carries the notice “The Chicago Manual of Style 18th edition text © 2024 by The University of Chicago.”
Chicago is the one to watch, because the 18th edition is recent enough that a great many pages on the web still describe the 17th without saying so. There is a one-second test, and it works because the 18th edition changed something visible in almost every book citation. Chicago's own list of what is new says: “A place of publication is no longer required in citations of books.”
So look at any Chicago book example. The 18th-edition note reads “Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown (Pantheon Books, 2020), 45.” If the guide you are reading tells you to write a city before the publisher — New York: Pantheon Books, 2020 — it is describing the 17th edition or earlier, and you should assume the rest of the page is the same vintage.
This is the part that is genuinely worth understanding, and it is the reason MLA behaves differently from every other style a student meets. Most people learn citation as a set of recipes: here is how you cite a book, here is how you cite a website, here is how you cite a film. MLA 9 does not work that way. It gives you one ordered set of slots and asks you to decide which facts about your source belong in which slot.
MLA's own wording: “Each entry in the list of works cited is composed of facts common to most works—the MLA core elements.” And: “They are assembled in a specific order.”
The organising idea is the container. “The concept of containers is crucial to MLA style. When the source being documented forms part of a larger whole, the larger whole can be thought of as a container that holds the source.” MLA's illustration is as plain as it gets: “For example, a short story may be contained in an anthology. The short story is the source, and the anthology is the container.”
The ordered elements, with the punctuation that belongs to each slot
Elements 3 to 9 are the inside of one container, and they repeat for each container. Where that list came from: MLA's downloadable practice template sets out these nine, numbered, with exactly this punctuation. That PDF carries the line “From MLA Handbook (8th ed.)”, so read it as the shape rather than as the ninth edition's own document. The ninth edition's interactive practice template on the MLA Style Center shows the current structure: Author, Title of Source, a supplemental element, then Container 1, Container 2 and Container 3, then a final supplemental element.
Look at what the punctuation is attached to. A comma follows every element inside a container, and a period closes the container. The punctuation belongs to the position, not to the kind of source. That is why you never have to memorise how to punctuate a podcast: you work out which facts about the podcast go in which slots, and the commas and periods follow from where they landed.
The slots are also deliberately not literal. MLA's summary of what changed in the ninth edition includes “clarification that element names are not always literal and can apply to a range of situations (e.g., the Publisher element can refer to the publisher of a book or a sponsoring organization like the theater company that put on a play).” Publisher means “whoever is responsible for making this public”, which is how a theatre company, a museum, a university department and Penguin all fit the same slot.
And when a slot does not apply, it goes away. MLA: “An element should be omitted from the entry if it's not relevant to the work being documented.” There is no “n/a” and no placeholder.
A recipe list can only ever cover source types somebody thought of in advance. A slot system covers anything you can describe. The ninth edition was published in April 2021, before the current generation of chatbots existed, and MLA's recommendation for citing one is built entirely out of the elements above: the prompt described in the Title of Source position, the tool's name italicised in the container position, then version, publisher, date and the URL as the location. Nothing new had to be invented, because nothing in the template was ever tied to a list of formats.
MLA says the give is intentional: “the MLA template of core elements is meant to provide flexibility in citation. So if you find a rationale to modify these recommendations in your own citations, we encourage you to do so.” That sentence is unusual for a style authority, and it is the clearest statement of what MLA 9 is for. You are expected to reason about an unfamiliar source rather than hunt for a matching example.
The practical consequence for a student is that the useful question changes. Not “what is the format for a TikTok”, but: who is responsible for this, what is the thing itself called, what larger thing is it sitting inside, and how did I reach it. Answer those four and the entry assembles itself.
An MLA entry can hold more than one container, and this is the single most-missed part of the style. Here is MLA's own example of a journal article read in a database:
“Goldman, Anne. ‘Questions of Transport: Reading Primo Levi Reading Dante.’ The Georgia Review, vol. 64, no. 1, spring 2010, pp. 69-88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41403188.”
Walk it against the slots. Author is Goldman, Anne. Title of source is the article. The first container is The Georgia Review, and inside it sit Number (vol. 64, no. 1), Publication date (spring 2010) and Location (pp. 69-88). Then a period closes that container. The second container is JSTOR, and inside it the Location is the URL.
The same structure handles a chapter read on a digital library. MLA's example: “Poe, Edgar Allan. ‘The Masque of the Red Death.’ The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by James A. Harrison, vol. 4, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902, pp. 250-58. HathiTrust Digital Library, hdl.handle.net/2027/coo.31924079574368.” First container is the collected works, holding Other contributors (edited by James A. Harrison), Number (vol. 4), Publisher (Thomas Y. Crowell), Publication date (1902) and Location (pp. 250-58). Second container is HathiTrust Digital Library.
An ordinary article on a website needs only one container: “Deresiewicz, William. ‘The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur.’ The Atlantic, 28 Dec. 2014, theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-death-of-the-artist-and-the-birth-of-thecreative-entrepreneur/383497/.”
So whether you need a second container is a question about how you reached the source, not about what kind of thing it is. The same article has one container if you read it on the journal's own site and two if you read it through a library database. The generator on this page has a single “Site / Journal / Publisher” field, which means it can build the first container and cannot build the second. If you found your source through a database, you will be adding that part by hand.
Read the three MLA examples above closely, because the same three details appear in all of them and they are easy to check with your eyes.
The period that ends the Title of Source goes inside the closing quotation mark. MLA writes …Creative Entrepreneur.” and …Reading Dante.” — not …Reading Dante”. This is the most common single error in generated MLA entries, including the one on this page.
The container title is italicised. The Atlantic, The Georgia Review, JSTOR, HathiTrust Digital Library. The title of the source stays in quotation marks; the thing holding it goes in italics.
MLA's own examples print URLs without the protocol. theatlantic.com/magazine/… and www.jstor.org/stable/41403188, with no https:// in front.
APA is built on a shorter list and a different logic. Its own description: “Reference list entries include the four elements of the author, date, title, and source.” Four slots, and most of the work is in knowing how each one is formatted.
Author. “Invert all individual authors' names, providing the surname first, followed by a comma and the author's initials.” The pattern APA prints is Author, A. A. This is a real difference from MLA rather than a nicety: the same person is Sapolsky, R. M. in APA and Sapolsky, Robert M. in MLA, so an author field filled in for one style is wrong for the other. The generator above does not convert between them.
Title. “Finish the title element with a period. However, if the title ends with a question mark or exclamation point, that punctuation mark replaces the period.”
Italics, and why one switch cannot be right. APA's rule turns on whether the work stands alone. For a work that is part of a greater whole, such as a journal article or a chapter in an edited book, the title is neither italicised nor put in quotation marks. For a work that stands alone, such as a book, a report or a webpage, the title is italicised. This is APA's counterpart to MLA's container idea, and it means the italics move depending on what you are citing: for a journal article the italics land on the journal name, and for a book they land on the book's own title.
Source. “A location is not required in the source element for most works (e.g., do not include the publisher location for book references).” Two of APA's own examples show the result:
“Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. Penguin Books.”
“Bologna, C. (2019, October 31). Why some people with anxiety love watching horror movies. HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/anxiety-love-watching-horror-movies_l_5d277587e4b02a5a5d57b59e”
Three things to notice in those two lines. The book title and the webpage title are both italicised, because both works stand alone. The publisher and the site name are not. And the webpage reference carries an exact date, (2019, October 31), where the book carries only a year — APA's instruction for a news story on a website is to “Provide the specific date the story was published”. The generator on this page offers one Year box, so an APA webpage entry it produces will be missing the month and day.
Chicago asks a question the other two do not: which of its two documentation systems are you using? Its citation quick guide describes them and says who uses each. “In the notes and bibliography system, sources are cited in numbered footnotes or endnotes”, an approach “preferred by many working in the humanities, including literature, history, and the arts”. “In the author-date system, sources are briefly cited in the text, usually in parentheses, by author's last name and year of publication”, which is “preferred by many in the sciences and social sciences”.
Within notes and bibliography there is a second split that trips people constantly: the note and the bibliography entry are different shapes for the same source. Chicago's own pair for one book:
Note: “Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown (Pantheon Books, 2020), 45.”
Bibliography: “Yu, Charles. Interior Chinatown. Pantheon Books, 2020.”
Four differences in one short example. The note gives the name in natural order and the bibliography inverts it. The note separates its parts with commas and the bibliography with periods. The note puts the publication facts in parentheses and the bibliography does not. And the note ends with the page you actually used, 45, which a bibliography entry does not carry.
The journal pair shows the page-number difference more clearly still, because the two entries cite different ranges on purpose:
Note: “Hyeyoung Kwon, ‘Inclusion Work: Children of Immigrants Claiming Membership in Everyday Life,’ American Journal of Sociology 127, no. 6 (2022): 1842–43.”
Bibliography: “Kwon, Hyeyoung. ‘Inclusion Work: Children of Immigrants Claiming Membership in Everyday Life.’ American Journal of Sociology 127, no. 6 (2022): 1818–59.”
The note's 1842–43 is the passage being cited. The bibliography's 1818–59 is the whole article. In both, the article title sits in quotation marks and the journal name is italicised.
For a web page, Chicago's bibliography example is “Google. ‘Privacy Policy.’ Privacy & Terms. Effective November 15, 2023.” — the organisation takes the author position, and the date given is the one the document itself asserts.
The style dropdown offers both, which it did not until 7 October 2026. Chicago 18 (bibliography) inverts the name, separates the parts with periods and uses no parentheses. Chicago 18 (note) gives the name in natural order, separates with commas, puts a book’s publication facts in parentheses and ends with the page you actually used, which is why selecting it reveals a Page(s) cited box. Before that date the menu offered only one shape, labelled “Chicago Notes” while producing a bibliography entry, so a student told to use footnotes had nothing here at all. Type the name inverted in both cases; the note form swaps it for you.
Every style has a rule for an unsigned source, and MLA's is explicit enough to quote: “When a work is published without an author's name, begin the works-cited-list entry with the title of the work. Do not use Anonymous in place of an author's name.” MLA's example is “‘English Language Arts Standards.’ Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2017, www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/.” — title first, container italicised, no author slot at all.
APA publishes the same instruction as a template. Its missing-information table gives, for a missing author, “Provide the title, date, and source” in the shape Title. (Date). Source., and on the word itself: “For a missing author, do not use ‘Anonymous’ as the author unless the work is actually signed ‘Anonymous.’”
Until 7 October 2026 the generator above wrote Anonymous into the author position whenever that field was left empty, which is exactly what both manuals name as wrong. Leave the box empty now and all four outputs begin with the title. For Chicago the same shape is produced, but it is an inference rather than a sourced rule: the manual’s own sections on unsigned works sit behind its subscription and could not be read, so check that one against your copy.
It builds one line, not an entry with parts. There are no fields for volume, issue, page range, edition, translator, editor or second container, so anything scholarly — which is most of what gets cited in a real paper — needs those added by hand afterwards.
It does not know your volume, issue or page range. There are no fields for them, so a journal entry in any of the four outputs stops at the year and the rest is yours to add. The one exception is the Chicago note, which has a Page(s) cited box because the page is what distinguishes a note from a bibliography entry.
It cannot tell a work that stands alone from one that does not, except by the source type you pick. The italics follow that dropdown, so a report, a thesis or a blog post filed under the wrong one of the three types will be italicised in the wrong place.
It cannot convert a name between the styles' author formats. One author box feeds all four outputs, and APA wants initials where MLA and Chicago want the name as printed. Since 7 October 2026 the box says which form the selected style wants, and the note form swaps an inverted name into natural order, but nobody is turning Robert M. into R. M. for you.
Its APA output should be confirmed against APA. Check any APA line this page produces against the current guidance at apastyle.apa.org before you submit it.
It knows nothing about your in-text citations. Every style pairs a reference list with a matching in-text form, and this page only ever touches the list.
It does not save anything. There is no account and no stored library. Copy what you want to keep.
Every edition number, year and quoted rule above was read from the style's own documentation on 1 October 2026, with the one exception noted for the APA pages. Nothing you type into the generator leaves your browser. More: the rest of the MyCampusKit tools.
MLA 9 (the ninth edition of the MLA Handbook, published April 2021), APA 7 (the seventh edition of the Publication Manual, copyright 2020) and Chicago 18 (The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition text copyright 2024). Ask which edition your instructor wants before you trust any citation page, including this one, because the shapes differ between editions.
Look at a book citation. The 18th edition says “A place of publication is no longer required in citations of books”, and its own example note reads “Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown (Pantheon Books, 2020), 45.” If a guide tells you to write a city before the publisher, it is describing the 17th edition or earlier.
Because the template describes slots rather than source types. MLA puts it this way: “Each entry in the list of works cited is composed of facts common to most works—the MLA core elements”, and “The concept of containers is crucial to MLA style. When the source being documented forms part of a larger whole, the larger whole can be thought of as a container that holds the source.” You decide which facts about your source fill which slots, so the same nine slots cover a format nobody had in 2021. MLA's own guidance for citing a generative AI tool is built from those same slots.
Author, then Title of source, then, for each container: Title of container, Other contributors, Version, Number, Publisher, Publication date, Location. Every element inside a container is followed by a comma and the container is closed with a period. The ninth edition's interactive practice template allows up to three containers plus supplemental elements.
When you reached the source through something. MLA's own example is “Goldman, Anne. ‘Questions of Transport: Reading Primo Levi Reading Dante.’ The Georgia Review, vol. 64, no. 1, spring 2010, pp. 69-88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41403188.” The journal is the first container and JSTOR is the second. That is a question about how you got there, not about what the source is, and the generator above has only one container field.
The title. MLA states it plainly: “When a work is published without an author’s name, begin the works-cited-list entry with the title of the work. Do not use Anonymous in place of an author’s name.” APA agrees and publishes a template for it, Title. (Date). Source., and says to use Anonymous only where the work is actually signed that way. Since 7 October 2026 the generator above does this for you: leave the author box empty and all four outputs begin with the title. Until that date it wrote the word Anonymous into the author position, which is the one thing MLA names as wrong.
Because the author element is defined differently. APA says “Invert all individual authors' names, providing the surname first, followed by a comma and the author's initials”, giving the pattern Author, A. A. MLA uses the name as the source gives it. The same person is Sapolsky, R. M. in APA and Sapolsky, Robert M. in MLA, so an author field filled in for one style is wrong for the other.
It depends on whether the work stands alone. APA italicises the titles of works that stand alone, such as books, reports and webpages, and does not italicise or quote the title of a work that is part of a greater whole, such as a journal article or a book chapter. For those, the italics move to the journal or book name instead. One setting cannot be right for both, which is why a generated APA line needs checking by eye.
No. Treat it as a draft that saves typing. It still has no fields for volume, issue, page range, edition, translator, editor or a second container, it offers a single Year box where APA wants an exact date for a webpage, and it cannot convert a name between the styles’ author formats, though it now says which form the style you picked wants. Since 7 October 2026 it does place the italics per style and per source type, it puts the MLA period inside the closing quotation mark, and it offers a Chicago note as well as a bibliography entry. Check every line against the style your instructor named.
No. There is no account and no saved library. Everything is built in your browser from what you type, and nothing you enter leaves it, so copy anything you want to keep.