Free tool, writing and publishing
Citation generator
A DOI in, a formatted reference out, in four styles.
Paste the DOI of a paper and the tool gives you its reference in APA 7th edition, IEEE, Harvard (Cite Them Right) and Vancouver. Every style comes with a Copy button of its own. Two more buttons save the record as a BibTeX or RIS file.
We made it for the boring part of the thesis, the reference list. Many scholars are telling us the same story. There are 140 papers in one folder, the guide has asked for IEEE, and half the references were typed by hand two years back. Here you paste the DOI only and the typing part is gone. One request from our side, give every entry a quick reading before it goes in the reference list.
Not sure the answer fits your study? WhatsApp us or call, and we’ll look at it with you.
How the tool works
Every article, chapter or book gets a DOI from its publisher. It is a permanent ID. Mostly, journal DOIs are registered with Crossref, and Crossref keeps the record the publisher sends. That record has the title, authors, journal, volume, issue, pages and year. When you click the button, your browser asks Crossref directly for this record. Crossref wants regular users to send an email ID along with the request, so we send our contact email and the DOI. Nothing more is sent. No other informations about you or your thesis go with it.
Before the lookup, the tool cleans up whatever you pasted. Suppose you copied https://doi.org/ or “doi:” along with the number, the tool removes that part. Same way a full stop at the end gets removed. Then it checks the DOI starts with 10. followed by a slash. After Crossref sends the record back, the author names are arranged as per the rule of the style you picked. Hand-typed references mostly go wrong in the names.
- In APA, all authors are written out up to twenty. If a paper has more than twenty, the first nineteen are kept, then an ellipsis, then the last author.
- For IEEE the initials come before the surname. Paper having more than six authors will show “et al.” in place of the full list.
- Harvard (the Cite Them Right version) shows three authors at the most. A paper with four or more authors gets “et al.”.
- Vancouver gives six authors and after that “et al.”. The initials are written together without full stops. The journal’s short title is used when the record has one.
You can test it with 10.1038/nature14539. In APA you will get LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning. Nature, 521(7553), 436–444, and after that the DOI link. For the BibTeX key, the tool puts together the first author’s surname, the year and the first long word in the title. So the key for this paper is lecun2015deep. The downloaded file is named with the first author’s surname and the year only. That keeps a folder of .ris files easy to sort. You can import either file into Zotero or Mendeley.
Sometimes the record is not a journal article, chapter, book or conference paper. In that case you will see a warning on top of the result. Reports, datasets and preprints are still formatted, but please check them by hand with our guide to APA, IEEE and Harvard.
Questions scholars ask
Where do I find the DOI of a paper?
On the first page of the PDF, check near the journal name or in the footer. On the publisher’s website it is many times shown just below the title. Every DOI starts with 10. and then a slash. If you have only the title, search it on the Crossref website or in Google Scholar and go to the publisher’s page from there.
The journal printed a DOI, but the tool says there’s no record. Why?
Some small journals put a DOI-like number on the paper and never get it registered. You can test it yourself. Open your browser, type https://doi.org/ and add the DOI after it. If the link opens nothing, that DOI does not exist. Take it as a warning about the journal itself, and check the journal before you cite that paper heavily.
Should I use the BibTeX file or the RIS file?
If you write in LaTeX or Overleaf, take BibTeX. RIS is for Zotero, Mendeley and EndNote. In Zotero you will find the import option in the File menu. Once it is in your library, use the Word plugin and cite it in the style your department has asked for.
Is it safe to copy the reference straight into my thesis?
Mostly yes, but read it one time first. Look at the capital letters in the title, the page range and the year. Also see that the citation in your chapter text agrees with the entry in the reference list. Examiners do notice if the list has some entries in one style and some in other style.
Can it build my whole reference list at once?
No, it does one DOI and one reference at a time. For the full list, add every DOI into Zotero or Mendeley, as both of them can read a DOI. The Word plugin will then make the reference list in your department’s style. Any odd entry, you can check here by hand.
Does your server see the DOIs I look up?
No. Your browser talks to Crossref directly for the lookup. On our server we only note that somebody used the tool, and the DOI you typed never reaches us.
Stuck on a chapter? Talk it through with us.
Call or WhatsApp, say where you are in your thesis, and we’ll tell you plainly what kind of help makes sense, if any.