Tools Citation Generator
Citation Generator

Generate citations in ABNT, APA, Vancouver, Chicago and BibTeX from a DOI

Paste the DOI or search by title. The five styles come out of the same generation, built from the metadata the publisher deposited with Crossref.

Version
2026.07
Last updated
Available since
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What this solves

The Citation Generator takes a DOI (or a title search) and returns the same reference in five styles at once: ABNT NBR 6023, APA 7th edition, Vancouver, Chicago author-date and BibTeX. The data comes from the Crossref record for that article, so what you copy is the metadata the publisher deposited, not text an AI wrote.

How it works

  1. Paste the DOI

    Paste the DOI or the full doi.org link. If you do not have the DOI, switch to the title tab and search by keywords.

  2. Pick the right article

    A title search returns up to five Crossref candidates with authors, journal and year. Searching does not consume credits: only generating the citation does.

  3. Copy the style you need

    The five styles appear together, each with a copy button. Every citation you generate stays in the history at the bottom of the page.

Method

What happens to your file, step by step, and where the result stops being a decision made by a model.

How it works inside

Two entry points, both querying Crossref. A pasted DOI is cleaned down to the part that starts with 10. and looked up directly; a text search of at least 3 characters returns 5 candidates for you to choose from. From the record the tool keeps a fixed set of fields (authors, title, journal, volume, issue, pages, DOI, ISSN, publisher and date), then one fixed recipe per style builds the five citations. When Crossref lists no author, the author names are fetched from OpenAlex by the DOI to fill the gap.

Where AI is used, and where it is not

No language model is involved at any point. The tool never contacts an AI service and has no prompt. The output comes from Crossref and OpenAlex fields passed through fixed formatting rules, so the same record always produces the same citation, character for character. Every rule (author order, initials, the et al. threshold, punctuation, italics) is fixed in the code. When a field is missing the slot stays empty; nothing is guessed.

What it accepts

  • A DOI, raw or as a URL. Only the first 10.xxxx/... substring is kept and a trailing dot is trimmed.
  • Or a free-text search of at least 3 characters against Crossref, which returns 5 candidates for you to pick.
  • Nothing else. No PDF, no .bib or .ris import, no manual metadata form, one record at a time.

What you get back

  • Five formats from the same record: ABNT NBR 6023, APA 7, Vancouver, Chicago author-date and a BibTeX entry.
  • Each of the five formats appears with its own copy button. There is no .bib or .ris file to download.
  • On screen the journal name appears in real italics or bold, and the Copy button puts both a formatted version and a clean text version on the clipboard. Pasting into Word keeps the formatting; pasting into a plain text editor gives clean text with no asterisks.
  • The article's title, authors, journal and year, shown above the citations (in the title search you also see them for each candidate before choosing), plus a history of your recent generations.

What this tool does not do

  • It does not invent missing bibliographic data. If Crossref has no volume, pages or journal name, the slot stays empty and the citation comes out incomplete.
  • It formats everything as a journal article. The Crossref type is read but never used, so a book, chapter, thesis or preprint gets article punctuation and a @article BibTeX entry.
  • It caps the author list at 6 and appends et al. in ABNT, APA, Vancouver and Chicago, regardless of what each style actually prescribes. BibTeX keeps every author.
  • It does not confirm the record is the work you meant. Text search returns the 5 top Crossref hits by relevance and the choice is yours.
  • It does not apply journal-specific rules or your institution's template, and it does not check the result against a CSL style file.
Plan
Starter
Cost
10 credits

What you get

  • Five styles, one generation

    ABNT NBR 6023, APA 7th edition, Vancouver, Chicago author-date and BibTeX come out of the same generation, which costs 10 credits. You do not repeat the search per style.

  • No AI writing your reference

    The formatting follows fixed rules over the Crossref record. No language model writes your reference, so nothing is invented when a field is missing.

  • BibTeX for your reference manager

    The BibTeX entry comes with key, author, title, journal, year, volume, number, pages, DOI and publisher, ready to paste into LaTeX or your reference manager.

  • History and formatted copy

    Each generation is saved with title, journal and year. Copying keeps the italics and bold of the style when you paste into Word.

Changelog

Every line below is a change that actually shipped, dated by the day it went out.

  1. Latest
    • Affiliation text such as university or department no longer appears where the author name goes.
    • When Crossref returns no authors, the tool now completes them from OpenAlex before formatting.
    • An article without authors comes out without stray commas or periods in the five styles.
    • Institutional authors stay whole instead of being split into given name and surname.
Show 3 earlier updates
    • Opening the tool now requires an active plan: credit balance alone does not grant access.
    • The access blocked message now shows in Portuguese when the site is in Portuguese.
    • Tool messages follow the site language, so the English version reads in English.
    • With an expired trial, the tool sends you to the credits page with the reason.
    • Citation Generator launched: paste a DOI or search by title to get a reference.
    • Each generation returns ABNT, APA, Vancouver, Chicago and BibTeX at once.
    • Generated citations are kept in a history on the page.

Questions and answers

Does it follow ABNT NBR 6023?

The ABNT output follows NBR 6023 for journal articles: authors in capitals, title, journal in bold, volume, issue, pages, year and DOI. The layout is built for articles, not for books, theses or web pages.

What if the article has no DOI?

You can search by title, but the tool only finds records that exist in Crossref. Books, theses, preprints without a Crossref deposit and older material may not appear at all.

Is the reference ready to submit as it comes?

Check it before submitting. The output reproduces the record as the publisher deposited it, so a truncated title or a misspelled author name carries through. Lists longer than six authors are shortened with et al.

Is my data used to train AI models?

This tool sends nothing to an AI model. It queries Crossref with your DOI or search term, uses OpenAlex only when the authors are missing, and applies the formatting rules locally.

How to cite this tool

Used it in your research? Here is the reference, already filled in with the version you are looking at and today's access date.

ABNT (NBR 6023)

LESSA, P. W. B. Citation Generator. Versão 2026.07. [S. l.]: Xplore Dados, 2026. Disponível em: https://xploredados.com/en/tool/citation-generator. Acesso em: 21 ago. 2026.

APA 7

Lessa, P. W. B. (2026). Citation Generator (Version 2026.07) [Computer software]. Xplore Dados. https://xploredados.com/en/tool/citation-generator

BibTeX

@software{xploredados_citation_generator_2026,
  author  = {Lessa, Patrick Wendell Barbosa},
  title   = {Citation Generator},
  organization = {Xplore Dados},
  version = {2026.07},
  year    = {2026},
  url     = {https://xploredados.com/en/tool/citation-generator},
  urldate = {2026-08-21}
}

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