About CiteSwap
CiteSwap is a free tool to find citations for papers and books and to convert reference lists between citation styles. Everything runs in your browser. There is no account, no server-side storage and no upsell.
The name comes from citation + swap: swapping a reference list from one citation style to another. CiteSwap is an academic referencing tool, not to be confused with siteswap, the notation jugglers use to describe juggling patterns.
Who it’s for
CiteSwap is built for anyone who reads, cites or reformats academic sources.
Students
Undergraduates and postgraduates writing essays, projects, theses and dissertations.
- Cite journal articles, books, chapters and websites in the style your department requires.
- Get the in-text citation (or footnote) to match every reference.
- Collect sources as you go and export the finished reference list for Word or Google Docs.
Find citations and papers →
Lecturers and supervisors
Academics preparing teaching materials, supervising students and publishing.
- Build reading lists and course packs with correctly formatted references.
- Check students’ reference lists against the catalogue record.
- Format your own articles and book chapters for a journal or publisher.
Convert a reference list →
Researchers
Anyone looking for material for a research project, journal article or book.
- Search by topic, title or author to find journal articles, books, chapters and conference papers to read.
- See where each work was published and how often it has been cited.
- Open the publisher’s page or a free PDF where one exists, then cite it in one click.
Search for sources →
Anyone switching citation styles
Students and researchers whose supervisor, journal or publisher asks for a different style.
- Paste a whole reference list and convert it, for example APA to Harvard or MLA to IEEE.
- Every reference is checked against Crossref, then reformatted and re-sorted for the new style.
- Works with all 11 supported styles, plus DOIs, BibTeX and RIS.
Try APA to Harvard →
How it works
When you search or convert, your browser asks the open Crossrefcatalogue (and, for some items, OpenAlex, doi.organd Open Library) for the record's details, then formats it with the official Citation Style Language definition for the style you chose.
Licences and attribution
CiteSwap is built on these open-source projects:
- Citation styles and locale. From theCSL styles repository(commit
5dd83d1) and CSL locales repository(commit a89adec), © their respective authors, licensed underCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. The files are served unmodified from /csl/. Style files: apa.csl, modern-language-association.csl, harvard-cite-them-right.csl, ieee.csl, american-medical-association.csl, chicago-author-date.csl, chicago-notes-bibliography.csl, american-sociological-association.csl, american-political-science-association.csl, nlm-citation-sequence.csl, chicago-notes-bibliography-subsequent-author-title-17th-edition.csl. Vancouver and Turabian are dependent styles rendered with their parent style. For speed, when an alphabetically ordered style is loaded in your browser CiteSwap removes its<sort> instructions and orders the reference list itself using the same rules (author, then date or title). - citeproc-js 2.4.63, © 2009–2019 Frank Bennett. Licensed under theCommon Public Attribution License 1.0 or theGNU Affero General Public License 3.0. Used unmodified (a separate CiteSwap file speeds up one internal lookup without changing citeproc's code or output). Source code:github.com/juris-m/citeproc-js(npm package
[email protected]). - Citation.js (BibTeX and RIS import/export), © Lars Willighagen, MIT licence.
- Astro, Preact and Tailwind CSS, MIT licence. Book data from Open Library; article metadata from Crossref and OpenAlex.
The full licence texts of all open-source code shipped to your browser are in third-party-licenses.txt.
Formatted citations produced by CiteSwap are yours to use freely.