ACS Citation Generator

Create ACS citations for free. Paste a DOI, ISBN or link, or fill in the form, and get the references entry and the in-text citation formatted to ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication. No sign-up, nothing to install.

Style: ACS

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Your citations appear here, formatted in ACS. They are saved in this browser only: nothing is sent to us, and no account is needed.

    Paste and cite

    DOI, ISBN, PubMed, arXiv, YouTube or any web page. The details come from Crossref, Open Library, NCBI and the page itself.

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    Every field your style needs is checked, and gaps are flagged in amber before they cost you marks.

    10,863 styles

    The official Citation Style Language files, the same ones Zotero and Mendeley use, plus a dedicated AGLC4 engine.

    ACS rules students get wrong

    ACS, ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication. Used in: Chemistry and chemical engineering, and the journals of the American Chemical Society.

    • Sources are numbered in the order they are first cited, as superscript numbers or italic numbers in parentheses.
    • The reference list is numbered to match, with the number in parentheses: (1).
    • Authors are separated by semicolons, family name first with initials: LeCun, Y.; Bengio, Y.
    • Journal names use the CAS abbreviation and are italicised; the year is bold and the volume italic.
    • End a journal reference with its DOI where it has one.

    ACS examples for every source

    Each example below was formatted by this generator, so it is exactly what you will get.

    Journal article

    References entry

    (1) LeCun, Y.; Bengio, Y.; Hinton, G. Deep Learning. Nature 2015, 521 (7553), 436–444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539

    In-text citation

    1
    Book

    References entry

    (1) Kahneman, D. Thinking, Fast and Slow; Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2011.

    In-text citation

    1
    Chapter in an edited book

    References entry

    (1) Tversky, A.; Kahneman, D. Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. In Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases; Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., Tversky, A., Eds.; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1982; pp 3–20.

    In-text citation

    1
    Web page

    References entry

    (1) World Health Organization. Depression. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/depression (accessed 2026-09-28)

    In-text citation

    1
    YouTube video

    References entry

    (1) 3Blue1Brown. But What Is a Neural Network? | Deep Learning Chapter 1; YouTube, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk (accessed 2026-09-28)

    In-text citation

    1
    Podcast episode

    References entry

    (1) Glass, I. Amusement Park. This American Life, 2011. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/443/amusement-park

    In-text citation

    1
    Lecture or speech

    References entry

    (1) Pausch, R. Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, 2007. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

    In-text citation

    1
    Newspaper article

    References entry

    (1) Roose, K. A Conversation with Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled. The New York Times. February 16, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html

    In-text citation

    1
    Magazine article

    References entry

    (1) Carr, N. Is Google Making Us Stupid? The Atlantic. July 2008, pp 56–63.

    In-text citation

    1
    Report

    References entry

    (1) World Health Organization. World Mental Health Report: Transforming Mental Health for All; World Health Organization, 2022. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240049338

    In-text citation

    1
    Thesis or dissertation

    References entry

    (1) Nash, J. F. Non-Cooperative Games. PhD thesis, Princeton University, 1950.

    In-text citation

    1
    Conference paper

    References entry

    (1) 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; Curran Associates, 2017; Vol. 30, pp 5998–6008.

    In-text citation

    1
    Dataset

    References entry

    (1) Fisher, R. A. Iris, 1988. https://doi.org/10.24432/C56C76

    In-text citation

    1
    Film

    References entry

    (1) Inception; Warner Bros. Pictures, 2010.

    In-text citation

    1
    Software or app

    References entry

    (1) R Core Team. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing, 2023. https://www.R-project.org/

    In-text citation

    1
    ChatGPT or other AI

    References entry

    (1) OpenAI. ChatGPT, 2023. https://chat.openai.com/chat

    In-text citation

    1
    Dictionary or encyclopedia entry

    References entry

    (1) Merriam-Webster. Culture. Merriam-Webster.com dictionary.

    In-text citation

    1
    Preprint (arXiv, SSRN, bioRxiv)

    References entry

    (1) Devlin, J.; Chang, M.-W.; Lee, K.; Toutanova, K. BERT: Pre-Training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding. arXiv October 11, 2018. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1810.04805

    In-text citation

    1
    Blog post

    References entry

    (1) Karpathy, A. The unreasonable effectiveness of recurrent neural networks. Andrej Karpathy blog. https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

    In-text citation

    1
    Court case

    References entry

    (1) Mabo v Queensland (No 2); 1992.

    In-text citation

    1
    Legislation

    References entry

    (1) Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).

    In-text citation

    1

    Other citation styles

    How to cite every kind of source

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    Quoting a video, lecture or podcast?

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    Questions

    Which edition of ACS does this follow?

    ACS: ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication, formatted from the american-chemical-society style in the Citation Style Language repository. It is not yet checked against the examples in the ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication, so check the final list against the manual.

    Who uses ACS?

    Chemistry and chemical engineering, and the journals of the American Chemical Society.

    Is the ACS generator free?

    Yes. No account, no limit, and every export (Word, BibTeX, RIS, CSL-JSON) is included. Your list stays in your browser.

    Where do the details come from when I paste a DOI or link?

    DOIs come from Crossref and DataCite, ISBNs from Open Library and Google Books, PubMed IDs from NCBI, arXiv IDs from arXiv, YouTube links from YouTube, and web pages from the citation metadata the publisher embeds in the page (the same tags Google Scholar reads). Pages that carry no metadata are filled in as far as possible and the gaps are flagged for you.

    Can I export to Word, Zotero, EndNote or LaTeX?

    Yes. Copy the list with its italics into Word or Google Docs, download a formatted .docx, or export BibTeX for LaTeX, RIS for EndNote, Zotero and Mendeley, or CSL-JSON.

    How do I cite a quote from a video or lecture?

    Add the timestamp in the pinpoint box and paste the quote: the generator formats both for your style. To find the exact wording and the time it was said, get the full transcript of the video with timestamps first.

    Citations are formatted by citeproc-js by Frank Bennett (CPAL-1.0, or AGPL-1.0), the engine behind Zotero and Mendeley, running the official Citation Style Language styles (10,863 styles, commit 2e93558) and locales (commit a89adec), used under CC BY-SA 3.0. AGLC4 citations use the LexIntellect AGLC4 engine, checked against the Guide's worked examples. Always check a citation against the manual or your institution's guide before you submit.