CiteWise

In-text citation generator that shows its working

Type the author, year and page. CiteWise builds the citation in APA, MLA, Chicago or Harvard, shows exactly where it sits in your sentence, and tells you why. Then practise until you don’t need it.

Build an in-text citation

Style
Citation type
Author family names (or an organisation, e.g. World Health Organization)

Your APA 7 parenthetical citation

(Nguyen, 2021, p. 14)

Where it goes in a sentence

Sleep loss impairs next-day recall (Nguyen, 2021, p. 14).

What an in-text citation is

An in-text citation is the brief reference you place in your own sentence the moment you use someone else’s words, data or ideas. It is short on purpose: just enough (author and year, or author and page) for a reader to find the full entry in your reference list at the end of the paper.

Citation generators can fill in the brackets. What they can’t do is decide where a citation belongs, whether a sentence needs one at all, or when “et al.” kicks in. Those decisions are what markers actually grade, so every tool on this site explains the rule behind its output.

How to write an in-text citation in four moves

  1. Decide whether you need one. Quotes, paraphrases, statistics and anyone’s specific idea do; your own analysis and genuine common knowledge don’t. Unsure? Run the when-to-cite decision tree.
  2. Choose parenthetical or narrative. Put the author in brackets at the end of the claim, or name them in your sentence with a signal phrase.
  3. Add the right details for your style. Author and year for APA, Harvard and Chicago author-date; author and page for MLA.
  4. Place it next to the borrowed material, before the sentence’s full stop, and add a page number for direct quotations.

Anatomy of a citation

Tap any part of this sentence:

Signal phrase

Naming the authors in your own sentence makes this a narrative citation. It tells the reader whose idea is coming before they read it. APA spells out “and” here; inside parentheses it would be “&”.

Learning by poking at the parts is how this whole site works. On ahaboo, you learn by doing: watch photosynthesis unfold as you zoom into a plant, or work out why the Moon changes shape.

In-text citation examples in each style

The same source (Nguyen, published 2021, quoted from page 14) cited four ways. Pick a style for the full rules, edge cases and a pre-set generator.

StyleParentheticalNarrative
APA 7(Nguyen, 2021, p. 14)Nguyen (2021) … (p. 14)
MLA 9(Nguyen 14)Nguyen … (14)
Chicago(Nguyen 2021, 14)Nguyen (2021, 14)
Harvard(Nguyen, 2021, p. 14)Nguyen (2021) … (p. 14)
SituationAPA 7 exampleRule
Two authors(Nguyen & Ortiz, 2021)Name both, every time.
Three or more(Nguyen et al., 2021)First author + et al. from the first citation. See every style.
Organisation(World Health Organization [WHO], 2023)Introduce an abbreviation once, then use (WHO, 2023).
No author(Sleep and the Teenage Brain, 2020)Shortened title replaces the author.
No date(Nguyen, n.d.)“n.d.” for no date.
Two works at once(Lee, 2019; Nguyen, 2021)Alphabetical, separated by semicolons.
Web page, no page numbers(Nguyen, 2021, para. 4)Count paragraphs, or name a section heading.

Can you place the caret?

Ten short passages. Tap where the citation belongs, then see why. It takes about five minutes and it is the skill no generator can do for you.

Start the practice set

Questions students ask

What is an in-text citation?
An in-text citation is the short reference inside your sentence, such as (Nguyen, 2021, p. 14), that points the reader to the full entry in your reference list or bibliography. It marks exactly which words or ideas came from a source.
What goes in an in-text citation?
Usually the author’s family name and the year (APA, Harvard, Chicago author-date), or the author and page (MLA). Add a page or paragraph number when you quote directly or point to a specific passage.
Does the full stop go before or after the citation?
After. Write “…recall (Nguyen, 2021).” The only exception is a block quotation, where the citation comes after the final full stop.
Do I need an in-text citation when I paraphrase?
Yes. Paraphrasing changes the words, not the owner of the idea. APA and Harvard only encourage a page number for paraphrases; MLA includes one whenever the source has pages.
What if the source has no author?
Use a shortened title in place of the author: italicised for books, reports and web pages, in quotation marks for articles and chapters. For organisations, use the organisation’s name as the author.
Is this an automatic citation generator?
It builds the in-text part for you from the details you type, and it explains every choice so you can do it unaided in an exam or when a generator gets it wrong. Nothing is scraped or guessed.

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