Study · guides

Citation generator, homework and study tools

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated · 7 min read

This is the entrance to the study tower. A citation generator at two in the morning, a reference list that has to match a style guide exactly, a maths problem that will not resolve, and notes that need to survive until an exam.

The citation wing is the largest, and the work it covers is entirely mechanical: a set of rules about punctuation and order, different for each style, applied identically every time. Software does it well. What software does badly is knowing which edition of which style your department wants, and that is the part these floors keep coming back to.

One caution runs through that entire wing. A generator produces a reference from whatever metadata it can find, and metadata can be incomplete or wrong — a missing editor, a wrong year, a journal name abbreviated in the wrong style. The output needs checking, every floor says so, and the floors show what to check rather than telling you to be careful.

Homework and maths are not covered here yet, and when they are it will be around one distinction. There is a difference between a tool that shows you the working and one that hands you the answer, and it is the difference between learning the subject and meeting it again later in a room with no phone. Those floors say which tools do which.

The notes wing is the quietest one here, and the one whose return arrives latest. It covers systems for keeping what you have read in a form you can still use months later — the work that, done in October, is why February is calmer.

Three levels, and you are on the first. This atrium lists the floors; a floor covers one subject completely and holds the shorter guides underneath it. Nothing here is more than three clicks from the front door.

One thing is worth saying at the door about how this tower treats artificial intelligence, since it now touches every wing. These tools are genuinely useful for studying and they are genuinely capable of ending a degree, and which of the two happens depends entirely on where in the process they are used. Asking one to explain a concept you have read three times and still cannot follow is study. Asking one to produce the thing you then hand in is not, regardless of how much you edit it afterwards. Every floor that touches this says so in the same words, and none of them pretends the temptation is imaginary or that detection is reliable enough to be the reason you should care.

Where to start

Six ways in.

“I need a reference list by tomorrow.”
Start at citing things
“Which style does my department want?”
That is a floor in citing things
“I have four hundred sources to manage.”
You want a reference manager, in citing things
“Is using AI for homework cheating?”
What a checker can and cannot show is in Is using ChatGPT cheating?
“My notes are useless when I come back to them.”
That is notes that last
“I have an exam in two weeks.”
Retrieval and spacing, in How to study effectively

Before the citations

The studying itself, which happens before any of the formatting below and decides how much of it you will have to do. Two university centres, two techniques.

How to study effectivelyRetrieval and spacing — and why rereading is the thing both are defined against.Open this guide → Writing a bibliographyWhat has to be recorded while you read, if the list at the end is to be possible.Open this guide →

Citing things

One floor per style and per tool. Each style floor shows the pattern for the sources people actually use — a website, a chapter, a video, a paper with fifteen authors — rather than the easy cases.

Citing a websiteThree styles, three answers — and one of them says you may not need a citation at all.Open this guide → APAThe current edition’s patterns for the sources with the least obvious rules.Open this guide → BibliographiesThe three lists have different names for a reason, and two style bodies define the difference.Open this guide → MLAThe container model, and how it handles sources that are not books.Open this guide → ChicagoTwo systems, not one — notes and bibliography, or author-date. Choosing is the first step.Open this guide → FootnotesMaking the number appear, and what belongs in the note once it does.Open this guide →
HarvardA family rather than a standard, with local variations set by each institution.Being built
IEEEA working generator for the four shapes IEEE uses, checked against the IEEE Reference Guide.Open this guide → TurabianA bibliography generator for the three shapes the official quick guide prints, and the title page.Open this guide → APSAA reference generator for the three shapes the APSA Style Manual prints, checked page by page.Open this guide → BibTeXFour entry types with their required and optional fields, and what a misspelt field name silently does.Open this guide → AMAWhy this style has no generator here: the manual that defines it cannot be read to check one.Open this guide → ACSThe guide is free and an automated reader cannot open it, so there is no generator — and here is why.Open this guide → ASAThe reachable quick guide is the third edition of 2007 and the current one is the seventh.Open this guide →

Notes that last

Keeping what you read in a form you can still use. Unfashionable, unglamorous, and the highest-return wing in this tower over a whole degree.

Taking notesCornell publishes five steps, and only the first one happens during the lecture.Open this guide →

Not covered here. It will not do anybody’s homework. The floors about AI in study are written to explain what the tools do and where institutions draw the line, and that line is stated on every one of them.

It will not tell you a generator’s output is ready to submit. The floors show the specific fields that come out wrong, which takes a minute and saves a mark.

It will not pretend the citation styles are stable. Editions change, departments vary, and a floor that states a rule without naming the edition it comes from is worse than no floor at all.

And it will not carry affiliate links, including for the reference managers and note apps that run generous student referral schemes.

On sourcing: every rule quoted in the citation wing names the style manual and edition it comes from, and every floor says when it was last checked against that manual. Style guides are revised, departments adopt revisions at different speeds, and an undated referencing page is one of the more reliable ways to lose marks for following instructions correctly. What holds instead is simple: every citation floor names the edition it follows, and no floor here carries an affiliate link.

Written by Alberto Gulotta

Founder and editor of AI Tools Primer, writing from Palermo, Italy. Thirty-five years of taking computers apart, starting with a Commodore 64 — the long version is on the about page.

Something wrong on this page? Write to aitoolsprimer@gmail.com and it gets fixed.

Written on 20 August 2026 · last checked 9 September 2026.

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