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Free ASA Citation Generator

ASA 7th edition references and in-text citations from a DOI, ISBN, URL or title, with the rules explained. Export the list to Word.

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    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.

    Your bibliography will appear here Add a source on the left and it is formatted in the style you picked, with its in-text citation underneath.

    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).

    Saved in this browser — never sent to us.
    Keeps italics & indent

    ASA citation generator

    ASA 7th edition citations, formatted from the source record

    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 ASA 7th edition — the author–date system used in sociology and the ASA journals, and many social-science courses. The references entry and the in-text citation come together, and the rules are those of the American Sociological Association Style Guide, 7th edition (2022), published by the American Sociological Association. The 7th edition was published in 2022 and is close to the 6th (2019).

    The ASA Style Guide is sold by the association; its quick tips page is free.

    How to cite in ASA here

    Three steps, about twenty seconds a source.

    1

    Paste what you have

    A DOI, an ISBN, a PubMed or arXiv ID, a web address, or a title. ASA 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.

    2

    Read the card

    Each source gets a card showing what the catalogue held and what the tool changed to fit ASA: 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.

    3

    Take the finished list

    Copy the list with its formatting into Word or Google Docs, or download a .docx with the hanging indent and spacing already set. BibTeX, RIS and CSL-JSON exports carry the same data into Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote or LaTeX.

    How ASA formats a citation

    The rules the tool applies, from the American Sociological Association Style Guide, 7th edition (2022).

    • In the textThe surname and year with no comma, and a page after a colon with no space: (Kuhn 2012:12). Two authors are joined by and; three are all named the first time, (Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler 1991); four or more are the first author and et al.
    • The referencesA list headed References, alphabetical by surname, with the year straight after the author's name: Kuhn, Thomas S. 2012. Hanging indent.
    • Author namesFull first names, the first author inverted: Golder, Scott A., and Michael W. Macy. All authors are listed.
    • Titles and capitalsTitle case. Books and journals italic; article and chapter titles in quotation marks. A chapter gives its pages before the book: Pp. 41–58 in Syntax and Semantics.
    • DatesThe year after the author. A web page gives a retrieval date only if the page is undated.
    • Links, identifiers and placesVolume and issue run together with the pages: 333(6051):1878–81, shortened. A DOI as doi:10.…, and a book keeps its place of publication: Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    ASA 7th edition examples, printed by the tool

    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.

    • Web page, organisation as author, no date

      AI Writing Assistant. n.d. “Free AI Writing Tools: What Each Does and When to Use It.” Retrieved September 18, 2026. https://www.aiwritingassistant.net/tools.html.

      In text: (AI Writing Assistant n.d.)

    • Journal article, two authors

      Golder, Scott A., and Michael W. Macy. 2011. “Diurnal and Seasonal Mood Vary with Work, Sleep, and Daylength Across Diverse Cultures.” Science 333(6051):1878–81. doi:10.1126/science.1202775.

      In text, citing page 1880: (Golder and Macy 2011:1880)

    • Chapter in an edited book

      Grice, H. Paul. 1975. “Logic and Conversation.” Pp. 41–58 in Syntax and Semantics, Volume 3: Speech Acts, edited by P. Cole and J. L. Morgan. New York: Academic Press.

      In text, citing page 45: (Grice 1975:45)

    • Journal article, three authors

      Kahneman, Daniel, Jack L. Knetsch, and Richard H. Thaler. 1991. “Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5(1):193–206. doi:10.1257/jep.5.1.193.

      In text: (Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler 1991)

    • Book, later edition

      Kuhn, Thomas S. 2012. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 4th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

      In text, citing page 12: (Kuhn 2012:12)

    • Conference paper, eight authors

      Vaswani, Ashish, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. 2017. “Attention Is All You Need.” Pp. 5998–6008 in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30. Curran Associates.

      In text: (Vaswani et al. 2017)

    Common mistakes in ASA citations

    Five errors markers see most often, and what the tool does about each.

    A comma before the page

    ASA writes (Kuhn 2012:12) — a colon, no space, no p.

    Initials instead of first names

    ASA writes authors' names in full as they appear on the work: Thomas S. Kuhn, not Kuhn, T. S.

    Et al. for three authors

    The first citation of a three-author work names all three; et al. from the second citation, and always from four authors.

    Leaving out the place of publication

    ASA still gives it: Chicago: University of Chicago Press. APA 7 dropped it, which is where the habit comes from.

    A pp. after the chapter

    The chapter's pages come first, capitalised: Pp. 41–58 in …

    ASA beside the styles it is confused with

    If your handbook names one of these instead, its page opens the generator with that style selected.

    ASA and APA

    APA is the other social-science standard: comma after the author, ampersand, initials rather than first names, sentence-case titles. Open the APA page.

    ASA citation generator FAQs

    Is the ASA citation generator free?

    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.

    Which edition of ASA does it use?

    The 7th edition (2022). The CSL style covers the 6th and 7th together because the entries a reader sees did not change between them.

    What does an in-text citation look like in ASA?

    The surname and year with no comma, and a page after a colon with no space: (Kuhn 2012:12). The tool prints the in-text form under each reference; turn on the in-text switch above the list if it is hidden.

    How do I cite a website in ASA?

    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 ASA form of a web page with an organisation as author and no date is: AI Writing Assistant. n.d. “Free AI Writing Tools: What Each Does and When to Use It.” Retrieved September 18, 2026. https://www.aiwritingassistant.net/tools.html. Check the author and date on the card — pages often leave them out, and the style has a rule for each case.

    Can I switch from ASA to another style later?

    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.

    Where do the ASA rules come from?

    From the American Sociological Association Style Guide, 7th edition (2022), published by the American Sociological Association, as encoded in the open Citation Style Language style the tool uses. The ASA Style Guide is sold by the association; its quick tips page is free. Where your department's own guide differs on a detail, the department's guide is the one your marker reads.

    After the reference list

    Check the essay's grammar, tighten the wording, or summarise a source before you cite it. One plan covers every tool.