Citation styles

Papero formats citations with over 10,000 citation styles, from APA and MLA to the house styles of single journals. Each document has one style. Every citation in the document and its reference list follow it, and you can change it at any time: Papero reformats them all.

Pick a style for a new document

When you start a document, press the settings line under the box on What are you writing?. In Document settings, Citation style offers nine common styles, each with the fields it suits:

• APA 7: psychology, education, social sciences
• MLA 9: literature, languages, humanities
• Chicago: history, arts
• Harvard: business, many UK universities
• IEEE: engineering, computer science
• Vancouver: medicine, health sciences
• AMA 11: medicine, medical journals
• Nature: natural sciences journals
• ACS: chemistry

For any other style, press More styles…. It opens Choose a citation style, where you search all of them. A new document started from an open one keeps that document's style when it is one of these nine. See Write your first document.

Change the style of a document

1. Scroll to the reference list at the end of your document.
2. Beside the heading, after Citation style, press the button with the name of the style the document uses now.
3. Type a journal or style name in the search box, such as "Lancet" or "Harvard". With the box empty, the list shows the Current style, Recent styles from your documents, and Popular styles.
4. Move through the list with the arrow keys or the mouse. The highlighted style shows a sample citation under the list, In text and as a Reference, in your document's language.
5. Press Enter or click the style you want.

Each style in the list says how it cites in the text: Author and year, Author and page, Numbered, Numbered, superscript or Short label. When a search matches more styles than the list shows, keep typing to narrow it.

You cannot change the style of an archived or read-only document.

Free and Plus

Every style works the same on Free and Plus: the in-text citations and the reference list both follow it. See Reference list.

The reference list heading

The heading of the list follows the style. MLA, and the styles based on it, call it Works Cited. All other styles call it References. The heading is part of your document, so it goes with your text when you copy or export it.

Language

Citations and the reference list follow your document's language when the style has that language. To change the document language, see Interface language.

When a style cannot format a document

A few styles cannot format a document with many long author lists, or many sources with the same first author and year. Papero then says This style cannot format this document, and suggests APA, MLA or IEEE, which can. You can also remove some of those sources.

Where the styles come from

The styles and their language files come from the Citation Style Language project at citationstyles.org, shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Each style keeps its own credits. Papero formats them with citeproc-js.

The papero.ai FAQ also answers which styles Papero supports. To compare the plans, see pricing.

Next: add a custom citation.