About

We built this because EasyBib broke our hearts

Citation generators used to be free. Then they were not. We fixed that.

The story

EasyBib was free for years. Students used it constantly, teachers recommended it, and nobody thought twice about it. Then Chegg bought it in 2021 and quietly moved the whole thing behind a $9.95 per month paywall. CitationMachine, which Chegg also owns, did the same. Suddenly, formatting a citation in APA or MLA required a subscription.

That is genuinely absurd. Citation formatting is not hard. The rules are public. The metadata for most sources is freely available through Crossref and Open Library. The only reason to charge money for it is because students are a captive audience who need it and do not have many good alternatives.

So we built FreeCitation. Free, fast, no account, no daily limit, no paywall lurking two searches in. It does one thing well: you paste something, you get a citation.

How it works (the slightly technical version)

You paste a URL, DOI, or ISBN. We figure out what you gave us and go from there:

DOIs

We query Crossref, the authoritative academic metadata registry used by publishers like Springer, Elsevier, and Wiley. If the DOI exists, we get back the full citation data straight from the source.

ISBNs

We check Open Library, which has metadata on millions of books. You get author, title, publisher, year, and everything else you need.

URLs

We read the Open Graph tags and standard HTML metadata from the page. Most news sites, blogs, and government pages embed this. It gives us the title, author, publication name, and date.

When all that fails

AI fills in the gaps. If a page has terrible metadata or none at all, we use a language model to read the page and extract what we can. This is a fallback, not the default.

Once we have the metadata, we format it using CSL, the Citation Style Language standard. CSL is an open specification that defines exactly how each citation style should look. We do not invent the rules, we follow the spec. The output is a properly formatted citation ready to paste.

What we support

Ten citation styles, all free, all without limits:

✓APA 7th edition

✓MLA 9th edition

✓Chicago 17th

✓Harvard

✓IEEE

✓Vancouver

✓AMA 11th

✓Turabian

✓Oxford

✓OSCOLA

And every source type you are likely to need:

WebsitesBooksJournal articlesYouTube videosNews articlesPodcastsGovernment reportsTheses and dissertations

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Designed, built, shipped and ranked by one person. FreeCitation is one of 21 live products in the unknown.ps portfolio, every one of them built in-house by Abd Shanti.

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The promise

→Free forever. Not free until we find a buyer, free forever.
→No signup ever required. Not even optional.
→No daily limits. Generate a hundred citations, we do not care.
→No creeping paywalls. If that ever changes we will tell you loudly and clearly.

Generate a citation now →Read the citation guides