ISBN to citation generator
Paste one or more ISBNs, pick a style and get a reference list for the books you cite. It works for books whose publisher registered them with a DOI, which covers most academic books from the large scholarly publishers.
Your reference list
How it works
Paste your ISBNs and pick a style
One per line, up to 10 at a time. ISBN-13 and ISBN-10 both work, with or without hyphens or spaces, and with or without the word ISBN in front. DOIs work here too.
We find the book's record
Each ISBN is matched to the book's record at Crossref, where scholarly publishers register their books, and the book's details are then read from that record through OpenAlex or doi.org.
Copy the list
The references come back formatted and in the order the style asks for. Copy them with the formatting, such as italic book titles, kept.
A worked example
Paste 978-1-4614-7137-0, the ISBN of the first edition of An Introduction to Statistical Learning, choose APA, and the reference reads:
978-1-4614-7137-0
James, G. M., Witten, D., Hastie, T. J., & Tibshirani, R. J. (2013). An Introduction to Statistical Learning. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7138-7
A book reference names the authors, the year, the title in italics and the publisher, followed by the book's DOI. The DOI here belongs to the electronic edition, which is the record the publisher registered; it points to the same book as the printed ISBN.
What each result means
- Found
- The ISBN matched a book record and the reference is built from it. Check it once, as you would any reference, before you hand in.
- No record found
- No book record with a DOI matches this ISBN. Many publishers, including most trade publishers and some university presses, do not register their books with Crossref, so their ISBNs cannot be found here. Write that reference by hand.
- This DOI is registered with an agency we cannot read yet
- The book's DOI belongs to a registration agency other than Crossref or DataCite, so we cannot read its record yet. Write that reference by hand.
- Not an ISBN or DOI
- The line does not look like a valid ISBN or a DOI. An ISBN has 10 or 13 digits, and its last digit is a check digit, so one wrong digit makes the whole number invalid.
- Daily limit reached
- The daily limit for the free tools has been reached. It resets at midnight UTC.
- Could not look this up right now
- A lookup or the formatter did not answer in time. Nothing is wrong with your ISBN: try again in a minute.
Which books it finds
This tool finds books that have a DOI registered with Crossref. That includes most academic books and textbooks from the large scholarly publishers, and many edited volumes and monographs.
Novels, popular non-fiction and many books from smaller presses have an ISBN but no DOI, so they answer no record found. For those, the details you need are on the book's copyright page: the authors, the title, the edition, the publisher and the year.
ISBN-10, ISBN-13 and editions
Books printed before 2007 carry a 10 digit ISBN; later ones carry 13 digits, starting with 978 or 979. Both work here, and an ISBN-10 is read as its 13 digit form.
Every edition, and often every format, has its own ISBN. Cite the edition you actually read: if you used the second edition, paste the second edition's ISBN, because the year and sometimes the page numbers differ.
Citing a chapter instead of the whole book
This tool cites the whole book. If you used one chapter of an edited volume, most styles ask you to cite the chapter, with its own authors and page range, inside the book's details.
Many chapters in scholarly books have their own DOI. Paste the chapter's DOI into the DOI to citation generator to get a chapter reference.
Check before you hand in
A reference is only as good as the record behind it. Publisher names can appear in a longer or shorter form than the one printed in the book, and the year in the record is sometimes the year of the electronic edition.
Compare each reference with the book's copyright page, and use the year and publisher printed there if they differ.
Questions
Is this ISBN to citation generator free?
Yes. You can format 10 ISBNs at a time and 30 a day without an account. The limit resets at midnight UTC.
Why does my ISBN say no record found?
Only books whose publisher registered them with a DOI at Crossref can be found. Many publishers do not do that, so their books cannot be looked up by ISBN here.
Which citation styles can I choose?
APA 7th edition, MLA 9th edition, Chicago author-date, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver, AMA, Nature and ACS.
Where do the details come from?
Crossref matches the ISBN to the book's DOI, and the book's details are read from its record through OpenAlex or doi.org. The formatting uses the official style files of the Citation Style Language project.
Do you keep the ISBNs I paste?
No. Each ISBN is sent to Crossref to find the book's DOI, and that DOI to OpenAlex and doi.org to read the record. Nothing is saved or linked to you. We count how many lookups each visitor makes in a day, using a key that cannot be turned back into an address and that changes whenever our service restarts.
Does it work with ISBN-10?
Yes. An ISBN-10 is checked and read as its ISBN-13, so both forms of the same book give the same reference.
Can I cite a chapter?
This tool cites whole books. For a chapter with its own DOI, use the DOI to citation generator.
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