ACS references and in-text citations from a DOI, ISBN, URL or title, with the rules explained. Export the list to Word.
Let’s cite!
Paste a DOI, ISBN, PubMed or arXiv ID, a web address, or just a title. Your list is saved in this browser, so you can close the tab and come back to it.
Formatted by citeproc-js © Frank Bennett, unmodified, under the CPAL — citeproc-js implements the Citation Style Language. Styles from the CSL project, CC BY-SA 3.0 (our copies).
Paste a DOI, an ISBN, a link or a title and the tool finds the publisher's own record for it and formats it in ACS — the numbered system used in chemistry, chemical engineering and the ACS journals. The references entry and the in-text citation come together, and the rules are those of the The ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication (American Chemical Society, 2020, updated online), published by the American Chemical Society. The online guide replaced The ACS Style Guide, 3rd edition (2006), in 2020.
ACS journals differ in which of the three citation forms they use; the journal's author guidelines say which.
Three steps, about twenty seconds a source.
A DOI, an ISBN, a PubMed or arXiv ID, a web address, or a title. ACS is already selected on this page. The tool works out what you pasted and asks the right catalogue — Crossref, OpenLibrary, PubMed, DataCite or Semantic Scholar — for the record.
Each source gets a card showing what the catalogue held and what the tool changed to fit ACS: a DOI reduced to its bare form, a page range tidied. Every change can be undone with one click if the record was right as it was.
Copy the list with its formatting into Word or Google Docs, or download a .docx with the numbering and spacing already set. BibTeX, RIS and CSL-JSON exports carry the same data into Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote or LaTeX.
The rules the tool applies, from the The ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication (American Chemical Society, 2020, updated online).
Six real sources — two journal articles, a book, a chapter, a web page and a conference paper — formatted by the same engine that runs the generator above. Nothing here was typed by hand, so what you see is what you get.
(1) Golder, S. A.; Macy, M. W. Diurnal and Seasonal Mood Vary with Work, Sleep, and Daylength Across Diverse Cultures. Science 2011, 333 (6051), 1878–1881. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1202775
In text, citing page 1880: 1
(2) Kahneman, D.; Knetsch, J. L.; Thaler, R. H. Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias. Journal of Economic Perspectives 1991, 5 (1), 193–206. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.5.1.193
In text: 2
(3) Kuhn, T. S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 4th ed.; University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2012.
In text, citing page 12: 3
(4) Grice, H. P. Logic and Conversation. In Syntax and Semantics, Volume 3: Speech Acts; Cole, P., Morgan, J. L., Eds.; Academic Press: New York, 1975; pp 41–58.
In text, citing page 45: 4
(5) AI Writing Assistant. Free AI Writing Tools: What Each Does and When to Use It. AI Writing Assistant. https://www.aiwritingassistant.net/tools.html (accessed 2026-09-18)
In text: 5
(6) Vaswani, A.; Shazeer, N.; Parmar, N.; Uszkoreit, J.; Jones, L.; Gomez, A. N.; Kaiser, Ł.; Polosukhin, I. Attention Is All You Need. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30; Curran Associates, 2017; pp 5998–6008.
In text: 6
Five errors markers see most often, and what the tool does about each.
ACS separates authors with semicolons: Golder, S. A.; Macy, M. W. Commas would run the initials of one author into the surname of the next.
ACS gives the authors of an ordinary paper in full. Et al. belongs in the text, and only in the author–year form.
Superscript, parenthetical number or author–year: pick the one the journal uses and use it throughout.
ACS abbreviates journal titles by CASSI: J. Am. Chem. Soc., not Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The year is bold in a journal reference — Science 2011 — and the volume italic. It is a small thing that ACS editors look for.
If your handbook names one of these instead, its page opens the generator with that style selected.
Nature also numbers by citation order but drops the article title from journal references and puts the year in parentheses at the end. Open the Nature page.
IEEE is the numbered style of engineering, with quotation marks around titles and a different order of elements. Open the IEEE page.
Yes. Every style, every source type and every export is free, with no account and no daily allowance, because the formatting runs in your browser rather than on our servers. Your list is saved in this browser and never sent to us.
The ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication, the online successor to the 2006 style guide. The style here follows its 2026 revision as published in the CSL repository.
ACS allows three forms and each journal picks one: superscript numbers, italic numbers in parentheses, or author and year. The tool prints the in-text form under each reference; turn on the in-text switch above the list if it is hidden.
Paste the address and the tool reads the page's title, author, site name and date where the page declares them, then formats it. The ACS form of a web page with an organisation as author and no date is: (5) AI Writing Assistant. Free AI Writing Tools: What Each Does and When to Use It. AI Writing Assistant. https://www.aiwritingassistant.net/tools.html (accessed 2026-09-18) Check the author and date on the card — pages often leave them out, and the style has a rule for each case.
Yes. Your sources are stored as data, not as formatted text, so choosing another style in the picker re-formats the whole list at once — APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver, or any of the 10,000 Citation Style Language styles the picker searches.
From the The ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication (American Chemical Society, 2020, updated online), published by the American Chemical Society, as encoded in the open Citation Style Language style the tool uses. ACS journals differ in which of the three citation forms they use; the journal's author guidelines say which. Where your department's own guide differs on a detail, the department's guide is the one your marker reads.
Check the essay's grammar, tighten the wording, or summarise a source before you cite it. One plan covers every tool.
Each page opens the generator with that style already selected, shows what the tool prints for six real sources, and explains the style's rules. The picker above the list reaches more than 10,000 styles in all.
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