There is a "Finishing a Paper?" block at the top of the page. Click to find your word processing file, or drag-and-drop it. CitationWizard.net will show you any in-text citations that don't have a matching reference, and let you add them to your list. Missing references are searched by the author-year in the citation, which is often enough to find the correct paper—if not, typing a word or two will usually find it. You can then confirm the match and add it to your reference list with one click.

CitationWizard.net searches every DOI to see that it matches you reference. If there is no DOI, it automatically searches Crossref and OpenAlex for a match. For books, automatic searches of Google Books and OpenLibrary are performed. For each reference you'll see a comparison of your original text with the official metadata from the DOI record (which can be wrong!), so you can check the source before making any changes. An editor allows you to fix any errors by hand, so you have full control.

Drag and drop a PDF file onto the page (or the upload area). CitationWizard extracts the DOI from the PDF and looks it up automatically. You can drop multiple PDFs at once — each becomes a reference in your list. Older PDFs that don't have DOIs on the first two pages are added to the reference list with the filename so you can look them up with one of the search tools.

After you've checked the proposed changes, you can download just the reference list, or let CitationWizard.net replace your original references in your Word document with the updated versions. Just upload your document, check the proposed changes, and click "Download" to choose the format.

CitationWizard formats in APA 7 by default. Just paste your references — it handles sentence casing, DOI links, article numbers, and all the other details APA requires. Switch styles using the style selector at the top of the page.

APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago (author-date), and the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics are built in. You can also paste a URL to any CSL style file to use any of thousands of journal-specific styles.

Yes. A common problem is citing a preprint year when the article has since been published in a journal with a different year. CitationWizard checks the Crossref record and flags when the year in your citation differs from the published year, so you can update it.

If no match is found in Crossref or OpenAlex, your original reference text is kept exactly as you entered it — CitationWizard never silently drops references it can't verify.

Click Copy to copy the formatted list to your clipboard, ready to paste into Word, Google Docs, or anywhere else. Or use Export .docx to download a Word file. If you uploaded a Word document, you can export the original file with just the references updated in place.

Yes. Paste your reference list from Google Docs into CitationWizard, then copy the formatted result back. Google Docs preserves the formatted text including italics and DOI links.

No. All processing happens in your browser. Your reference text never leaves your computer — the only external calls are to public academic databases (Crossref, OpenAlex) to look up DOIs and metadata. There is no AI involved.

No account is required to try CitationWizard. Free use includes a generous number of lookups. Create a free account (or subscribe) to unlock higher limits and save your reference lists to your Discourse profile.