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Citation Styles

Alfred Scholar lets you format your citations in any major academic style. Whether your target journal requires APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE, or another format, you can apply the correct style to your references.

Built-in styles

Alfred Scholar comes with support for all commonly used citation styles, including:

  • APA (7th Edition) - Psychology, education, social sciences.
  • MLA (9th Edition) - Humanities, literature, language arts.
  • Chicago (17th Edition) - History, arts, some social sciences.
  • IEEE - Engineering, computer science, information technology.
  • Harvard - General academic use, especially in the UK and Australia.
  • Vancouver - Medicine, biomedical sciences.

Creating a custom citation style

If your journal or institution requires a specific format that is not available:

  1. Go to Citations in the sidebar.
  2. Click Citation Styles.
  3. Click Create Style.
  4. Configure the style settings (see below).
  5. Click Save.

A live preview updates as you configure the style, showing how an example in-text citation and bibliography entry will look.

Note: Creating a citation style costs credits. See Credits & Usage for details.

Style settings

When creating a custom style, you can configure:

Basic information:

  • Style name - A descriptive name (for example, "Journal of Neuroscience 2026").
  • Description - An optional note about when to use this style.

Author format:

  • Name order - How author names appear (e.g. "Smith, J.K." or "J.K. Smith").
  • Max authors before "et al." - How many authors to list before truncating.
  • Separator - The character between author names (e.g. comma, semicolon).
  • Last connector - The word or symbol before the final author (e.g. "&" or "and").

In-text citation:

  • Format - Choose from numbered [1], author-year (Smith, 2020), superscript, or numbered with parentheses (1).
  • Bracket style - Square brackets, round brackets, or none.

Bibliography:

  • Title style - How titles are displayed: quoted, italic, or plain.
  • Journal style - How journal names appear: italic, plain, or abbreviated.
  • Year position - Where the year appears: after author, after title, or inline with journal.
  • Volume/issue format - How volume and issue numbers are displayed (e.g. "Vol. 12, No. 3" or "12(3)").
  • Pages format - How page ranges are shown (e.g. "pp. 1-10" or ": 1-10").
  • Include DOI - Whether to include the DOI in the bibliography entry and how to format it.

Sorting:

  • Sort order - How bibliography entries are ordered: alphabetical, by appearance, or chronological.

Editing a style

  1. Go to Citation Styles.
  2. Click on the style you want to modify.
  3. Update the settings.
  4. Click Save.

Deleting a style

  1. Go to Citation Styles.
  2. Find the style you want to remove.
  3. Click Delete and confirm.

Note: You cannot delete built-in styles, only custom styles you have created.

Next steps