PDF Citation Generator
Upload a journal article’s PDF and we’ll find the DOI embedded in the file, then cite it in APA, MLA, Chicago, or any of 10,832 styles. Free, no account — and the PDF never leaves your browser.
How it works
- Publishers embed the article’s DOIin the PDF’s metadata and page content. The tool scans the raw file and inflates its compressed streams — entirely in your browser — to find every DOI.
- Citing by DOI beats scraping the PDF’s text: the generator pulls the publisher’s official metadata from Crossref, so authors, title, journal, volume, and pages are exact.
- Working with a Word document instead? The Reference Extractor pulls a full reference list out of a .docx.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How does the PDF citation generator work?
- Journal publishers embed the article’s DOI inside the PDF — in its metadata and page content. The tool scans the file locally in your browser, decompresses its internal streams, and finds every DOI. One click then feeds the DOI to the CitationEasy generator, which pulls the article’s authoritative metadata from Crossref and formats the citation in your chosen style.
- Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
- No. The scan runs entirely in your browser using built-in decompression APIs — the file never leaves your device. Only the short DOI string is looked up (against Crossref) when you choose to generate the citation.
- Why cite by DOI instead of extracting the PDF’s text?
- A DOI lookup returns the publisher’s official metadata — exact author list, title, journal, volume, issue, pages, and date — which produces a more accurate citation than scraping text from the PDF layout ever could. It is the same reason reference managers like Zotero prefer identifier lookups.
- What if no DOI is found in my PDF?
- Scanned (image-only) PDFs, older papers, and non-journal documents often carry no DOI. In that case, search the article’s title in the CitationEasy generator — it looks up over 100 million works on Crossref — or cite it manually with the source form. For Word documents, the Reference Extractor tool can pull the full reference list.
- Is the PDF citation generator free?
- Yes — free, unlimited, no account, and no file-size paywall, like every CitationEasy tool. All 10,832 citation styles are available for the generated citation.