Website Citation Generator

About the Website Citation Generator

Paste the address of a web page and get its citation in APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver or AMA. MySmartCoPilot’s server reads only the page’s head — where publishers put the title, authors, date and site name for search engines and social networks — and sends those details back to your browser, which formats them in the style you choose. Nothing is guessed: what the page does not say stays empty for you to fill in, and every field can be edited.

The details come, in order of preference, from the citation tags Google Scholar reads, Dublin Core, schema.org data and Open Graph tags, with the page title as a last resort. When the page gives a DOI, the tool uses the DOI record instead, because it is more complete; addresses that contain a DOI, PubMed and arXiv links, and nature.com, bioRxiv, medRxiv and Lancet article addresses are looked up by their DOI or PMID directly. You can also skip the lookup and type the details yourself.

Common uses

• Citing news articles, blog posts, government and organisation pages, online magazines and videos in an essay, report or thesis.
• Getting the same source in two styles — APA for one course, Harvard or IEEE for another — without typing it twice.
• Checking what a page says about itself (author, date, site) before you trust it as a source.
• Collecting sources while you research, then sorting and exporting them all at once in the Bibliography Maker.

Where the details come from

• Citation tags (citation_title, citation_author, citation_publication_date, citation_journal_title, citation_doi…), which journals and repositories add for Google Scholar.
• Dublin Core tags (DC.title, DC.creator, DC.date) of the DCMI element set, common on library and government sites.
• schema.org data in the page head (Article: headline, author, datePublished, publisher).
• Open Graph tags (ogp.me: og:title, og:site_name, article:published_time) and Twitter cards, which most news sites and blogs have.
• The page’s <title>, with the site’s name removed, when nothing else names the page.

The first source that has a value wins for each detail. The box under the address shows what was found and in which format.

What the server does with the address

The address is checked first: only public http and https pages, never private or local network addresses (also checked through DNS for the page and for every redirect), at most three redirects and eight seconds per request. The server then reads the page only up to the end of its head, so the article text is never downloaded, and returns the extracted details — not the page. When a site answers with a bot check or a sign-in page instead of the page, the tool says so rather than citing that page. Lookups that found details are kept for 24 hours, under a SHA-256 hash of the address, so a page many students cite is fetched once a day; failed lookups are not kept. Each visitor has an hourly allowance of lookups, which keeps the service free.

What each style needs from a web page

• APA 7: author or organisation, date (year, month and day), title in sentence case, site name, URL; a retrieval date only for pages that change over time.
• MLA 9: author, title in quotation marks, site name, date, URL without https://; the access date is optional.
• Chicago: author, title, site, date or access date, URL.
• Harvard (Cite Them Right): author, year, title, URL and “Accessed:” with the date viewed.
• IEEE: author, title in quotation marks, site, “Accessed:” date and “[Online]. Available:” URL.
• Vancouver: title with [Internet], place and publisher, date, [cited date] and “Available from:” URL.
• AMA 11: author, title, site, published or updated date, “Accessed” date and URL.

Limitations

• Sites that block automated requests, need a login or a cookie consent first, or build their pages with JavaScript may return nothing: fill in the form by hand.
• Only the page’s head is read. A byline or date printed only in the article text is not found — add it yourself.
• Pages sometimes tag the wrong thing (the site’s name as the author, the date of the last update as the date published). Check the details against the page.
• PDF files and other documents are not read: use the document’s DOI if it has one, or enter the details by hand.
• Each visitor can look up a limited number of pages per hour; manual entry is never limited.

Privacy

The web address you look up is sent to MySmartCoPilot’s server, which fetches only that page’s head and returns its citation details. The page is not stored; the details are kept for up to 24 hours under a hash of the address, and logs record only the site’s host name, the status and the time. Everything you type in the form stays in your browser. Sources you add to the bibliography are saved only in this browser.