APA, MLA, Chicago or Harvard — which does your course want?

The honest first answer: your module handbook decides, not this page. Departments specify a style, and a well-formatted reference in the wrong style still loses marks.

But handbooks say “use Harvard” without explaining what that means, and reading lists arrive in whatever style the person who made them happened to use. So it helps to be able to recognise them.

The same book, four ways

Telling them apart in three seconds

Look at the date. It is the fastest tell.

• Straight after the author, in brackets → APA or Harvard
• Straight after the author, no brackets → Chicago author-date
• At the very end → MLA

Then look at the author’s first name. Initials mean APA or Harvard. A full first name means MLA or Chicago.

Then the title’s capitals. Sentence case — only the first word and proper nouns — is APA and Harvard. Title Case With Most Words Capitalised is MLA and Chicago.

APA versus Harvard, which the first two tests do not separate: APA puts a full stop after the bracketed year and does not name the city. Harvard usually has no stop after the year and does include the place of publication.

Which subjects use which

Broadly, and with exceptions everywhere:

APA — psychology, education, nursing, social sciences, business. Anywhere the recency of research matters, which is why the year sits right next to the author.

MLA — English, languages, philosophy, cultural studies, film. Anywhere you are analysing a text rather than reporting a finding. MLA’s in-text citation gives a page number and no year, because for literary analysis where in the text matters more than when it was published.

Chicago — history, art history, theology, and much book publishing. It comes in two distinct forms, which is worth knowing: author-date looks like the example above, while notes-bibliography uses numbered footnotes instead of parenthetical citations. History departments usually mean the second one.

Harvard — the UK default across many subjects, especially business, law and the sciences at British universities.

The in-text citations differ more than the references

This is where a mismatch is most visible to a marker.

MLA’s is the one people get wrong most often, because it looks like something has been left out. It has not: MLA genuinely omits the year in text.

The thing nobody tells you about Harvard

Harvard is not a standard. There is no Harvard committee and no definitive Harvard manual. It is a family of author-date styles, and universities each publish their own variant.

That has a practical consequence: two Harvard guides will genuinely disagree about punctuation, and neither is wrong. If your library publishes a Harvard guide — many use Cite Them Right — that document is your specification, and it beats any generator, including ours.

APA, MLA and Chicago each have a single published manual, so they do not have this problem.

Which to choose if nobody has told you

Rare, but it happens with independent projects and dissertations at some institutions.

1. Look at your reading list. Whatever your department cites in is what they are used to reading.
2. Ask the module leader. A two-line email, and it removes the risk entirely.
3. Failing both, match your discipline from the list above.

Then — and this matters more than the choice — be consistent. A marker will forgive a department-preferred style you did not use. They will not forgive a bibliography that is APA at the top and MLA at the bottom, because that reads as carelessness rather than convention.

Switching between them

If you have written in one style and need another, do not retype the references. Our citation generator holds your sources as structured data — author, title, year, publisher — and renders them in APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 17 or Harvard from the same entry. Switching styles is one click, and your whole bibliography changes with it.

It imports RIS and BibTeX too, so references already in Zotero, Mendeley or EndNote can come across rather than being rekeyed.

One limitation stated plainly: Chicago notes-bibliography — the numbered-footnote form — is not supported. If your history department wants footnotes, our Chicago output is not what you need.