# Citation Formatter: APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE & BibTeX (`pandadad0214/citation-formatter`) Actor Turn DOIs, ISBNs, arXiv IDs, titles or messy references into APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE and Vancouver citations plus BibTeX and RIS. Looks up Crossref, DataCite and Open Library, formats with citeproc-js and official CSL styles, and flags anything uncertain. - **URL**: https://apify.com/pandadad0214/citation-formatter.md - **Developed by:** [Panda Federation](https://apify.com/pandadad0214) (community) - **Categories:** AI, Education, Developer tools - **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks - **User rating**: No ratings yet ## Pricing Pay per event This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events. Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event ## What's an Apify Actor? An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes. In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours, and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store. In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server. Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md. ## How to integrate an Actor? If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects. You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready. Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run. For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below. Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`). # README ## Citation Formatter: DOI to APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver, BibTeX & RIS **Paste DOIs, ISBNs, arXiv IDs, titles or a messy reference list. Get clean citations in six styles plus BibTeX and RIS, with a flag on anything that needs a second look.** Formatting references by hand is slow, and online generators guess. **Citation Formatter** looks every reference up in the official registries (**Crossref**, **DataCite**, **Open Library**, plus **PubMed** for PMIDs), then formats it with **citeproc-js**, the open-source citation engine behind Zotero and Mendeley, using the **official CSL style files**. Nothing is hand-rolled, so the commas, italics and initials follow the style guide. - πŸ“š **Six styles in one run:** APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago author-date (18th ed.), Harvard (Cite Them Right 12th ed.), IEEE and Vancouver (NLM) - πŸ” **Exports for reference managers:** BibTeX (.bib) for LaTeX and Overleaf, and RIS (.ris) for Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote and Rayyan - 🧭 **Takes whatever you have:** DOIs, DOI links, ISBNs, arXiv IDs, PMIDs, bare titles, references in any style, or a pasted .bib/.ris file - 🚦 **Honest confidence:** every reference is marked **OK**, **CHECK** or **FIX**, with a plain-language reason - 🧹 **Cleans up registry data:** sentence-case titles for APA, initials fixed ("AJ" β†’ "A. J."), series vs. book title for conference chapters, duplicates removed - πŸ’Έ **$0.003 per formatted citation.** All six styles, BibTeX and RIS are included in that price. References we can't find are free. ### Who it's for - **Researchers, grad students and postdocs:** convert a bibliography from one journal's style to another before submission. - **Editors, proofreaders and thesis formatters:** turn a messy reference list into a clean APA or Harvard list in seconds, then spend your time on the edge cases we flag. - **Librarians and research support teams:** batch-convert reading lists and export them to Zotero or EndNote. - **Developers and AI agents:** turn DOIs into formatted citations through the Apify API or MCP, without maintaining a citation engine. ### How to use it 1. Click **Try for free**. Put one reference per line in **References**, or paste a whole list (or a .bib/.ris file) into **Paste a reference list**. 2. Pick your **styles** (all six are on by default and cost the same). 3. Click **Start**. Ten references usually take 10–20 seconds (preprint titles without a DOI can take up to a minute while we search DataCite). 4. Download the ready-to-paste bibliography from **Storage β†’ Key-value store** (`BIBLIOGRAPHY_APA`, `BIBLIOGRAPHY_APA_HTML` with italics for Word or Google Docs, `BIBLIOGRAPHY_BIBTEX`, `BIBLIOGRAPHY_RIS`...), or open the **Formatted citations** table. 5. Open **Needs review** to see the CHECK and FIX items and why they were flagged. #### Input example ```json { "references": [ "10.1038/nature14539", "ISBN 978-0-262-03384-8", "arXiv:1706.03762", "PMID: 26017442", "He K, Zhang X, Ren S, Sun J. Deep residual learning for image recognition. CVPR 2016", "https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(97)11096-0" ], "text": "@article{watson1953,\n author = {Watson, J. D. and Crick, F. H. C.},\n title = {Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids},\n journal = {Nature}, volume = {171}, number = {4356},\n pages = {737--738}, year = {1953}, doi = {10.1038/171737a0}\n}", "styles": ["apa", "mla", "chicago", "harvard", "ieee", "vancouver"], "includeBibtex": true, "includeRis": true } ``` ### Output example Real output from a platform run: **APA 7** > LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning. *Nature, 521*(7553), 436–444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539 > > Cormen, T. H., Leiserson, C. E., Rivest, R. L., & Stein, C. (2009). *Introduction to algorithms* (3rd ed.). The MIT Press. > > Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, L., & Polosukhin, I. (2017). *Attention is all you need* (arXiv:1706.03762). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.1706.03762 **MLA 9** > LeCun, Yann, et al. β€œDeep Learning.” *Nature*, vol. 521, no. 7553, May 2015, pp. 436–44, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539. **Chicago author-date** > LeCun, Yann, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton. 2015. β€œDeep Learning.” *Nature* 521 (7553): 436–44. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539. **Harvard (Cite Them Right)** > LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y. and Hinton, G. (2015) β€˜Deep learning’, *Nature*, 521(7553), pp. 436–444. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539. **IEEE** > \[1] K. He, X. Zhang, S. Ren, and J. Sun, β€œDeep residual learning for image recognition,” in *2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)*, IEEE, Jun. 2016, pp. 770–778. doi: 10.1109/cvpr.2016.90. **Vancouver (NLM)** > 1. LeCun Y, Bengio Y, Hinton G. Deep learning. Nature. 2015 May 27;521(7553):436–44. doi:10.1038/nature14539 One dataset row per reference (shortened): ```json { "index": 1, "input": "10.1038/nature14539", "inputType": "doi", "status": "OK", "confidence": 1, "matchMethod": "doi", "doi": "10.1038/nature14539", "title": "Deep learning", "authors": "LeCun, Yann; Bengio, Yoshua; Hinton, Geoffrey", "year": 2015, "apa": "LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning. Nature, 521(7553), 436–444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539", "mla": "LeCun, Yann, et al. β€œDeep Learning.” Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, May 2015, pp. 436–44, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.", "inText": {"apa": "(LeCun et al., 2015)", "mla": "(LeCun et al.)", "harvard": "(LeCun, Bengio and Hinton, 2015)", "ieee": "[1]"}, "bibtex": "@article{LeCun2015Deep, ...}", "ris": "TY - JOUR ...", "warnings": [] } ``` #### What OK, CHECK and FIX mean | Status | Meaning | Charged? | |---|---|---| | 🟒 **OK** | Exact DOI/ISBN lookup, or a text match with 90%+ confidence | Yes | | 🟑 **CHECK** | Formatted, but read the note first: the match was by title only, the venue or version differs (e.g. arXiv vs. proceedings), the record is retracted, or the registry is missing authors or a date | Yes (duplicates are free) | | πŸ”΄ **FIX** | Not found anywhere. Often a typo, a non-DOI source, or a fabricated reference. Listed at the end of each bibliography file as `[UNRESOLVED - check manually]` | No | Retracted papers are flagged in CHECK. To screen a whole bibliography for fabricated citations, retractions and wrong details, run our sister Actor, **[Reference Checker: Fake Citation & Retraction Detector](https://apify.com/pandadad0214/reference-checker)**. ### Files you get | Key-value store key | What it is | |---|---| | `BIBLIOGRAPHY_APA`, `_MLA`, `_CHICAGO`, `_HARVARD`, `_IEEE`, `_VANCOUVER` | Plain-text bibliography per style, sorted the way the style requires (alphabetical or numbered) | | `BIBLIOGRAPHY_