Terms that a human can actually read

What FreeCitation is

FreeCitation is a free tool that generates formatted citations from URLs, DOIs, and ISBNs. You give it a source, it gives you a citation in whichever style you need. That is the whole product.

It is not a substitute for your own judgment. Citing sources correctly is ultimately your responsibility. We make that job faster and easier, but we are a tool, not a guarantee.

Accuracy

We pull metadata from Crossref (for DOIs), Open Library (for ISBNs), and Open Graph tags (for URLs). These are reliable sources and we trust them. But they are not perfect. Publishers sometimes have errors in their Crossref records. Webpages sometimes have missing or wrong metadata. Our AI fallback is good but not infallible.

Always verify your citations before submitting academic work. Read them. Check the author name is spelled right, the year is correct, the title is accurate. Your professor will check too, and they know what a correct citation looks like.

We work hard to be accurate, but we cannot promise perfection. That is not a legal dodge, it is just true.

Acceptable use

Use FreeCitation as much as you want for personal, academic, commercial, or professional purposes. Generate hundreds of citations. Build a bibliography. Use it in your research workflow. All fine.

What is not okay:

• Scraping or hitting our API at scale programmatically without permission. We have rate limits for a reason and working around them is not cool.
• Using the service in any way that tries to break it, harm other users, or abuse the underlying APIs we rely on.
• Republishing the citation outputs and claiming they came from a tool you built. Obviously.

If you are building something that uses citation generation at scale, reach out at [email protected] and we will talk.

No warranty

FreeCitation is provided as-is. We do not guarantee uptime, accuracy, or that any specific feature will always be available. We try hard on all three but we are not making legally binding promises about any of them.

We are not responsible if a citation is wrong and your professor notices. We are sorry if that happens, genuinely, but double checking citations before submission is a reasonable expectation for anyone submitting academic work.

Changes to the service

We might change FreeCitation. We might add features, remove features, or adjust how things work. We will try very hard not to start charging for the core service.

If something major changes, we will say so clearly. We are not going to quietly move things behind a paywall and hope nobody notices. That is exactly what we built this to avoid.

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Questions or concerns about these terms?