ACS Citation Generator
An ACS citation generator formats references in the American Chemical Society style — a numbered system with semicolon-separated authors, bold publication year, and italicized journal and volume. It's the format required by ACS journals and most undergraduate and graduate chemistry coursework. Search by title, DOI, ISBN, or URL, confirm the match, and get a numbered reference plus its in-text marker.
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This ACS citation generator formats references in the style set by the American Chemical Society's own style guide, the required format for submissions to ACS-published journals — Journal of the American Chemical Society, Analytical Chemistry, and dozens of others. ACS numbers sources by citation order, separates authors with semicolons, and puts the publication year in bold right after the journal title, a detail unique to this style. Run a journal article, a book, or a website through this ACS citation generator and each comes back formatted with the same numbering and punctuation rules.
This ACS citation generator builds the reference entry and in-text marker directly from the American Chemical Society's own formatting rules, encoded in the open Citation Style Language (CSL) that Zotero also uses. Search by title, DOI, ISBN, or URL and this ACS citation generator pulls in a source automatically; confirm it's the right one, or type the details in by hand and the ACS citation generator still returns the same correctly numbered result.
Who uses ACS style
ACS style is required by American Chemical Society journals and is the default citation format taught in most college and graduate chemistry courses in the US. If a lab report, thesis, or journal submission specifies "ACS style" or "ACS Style Guide," an ACS citation generator saves you from tracking down every semicolon and bolded year by hand.
How to cite a journal article in ACS
This ACS citation generator separates authors with semicolons, bolds the year, and italicizes the journal name and volume number:
(1) Watson, J. D.; Crick, F. H. C. Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid. Nature 1953, 171 (4356), 737–738. https://doi.org/10.1038/171737a0.
The in-text citation is a superscript number: the structure of DNA was first described in 1953.1
How to cite a book in ACS
Feed a book's edition and publisher into this ACS citation generator and it lists the edition after the title, with the publisher and city at the end:
(1) Cormen, T. H.; Leiserson, C. E.; Rivest, R. L.; Stein, C. Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd ed.; MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2009.
How to cite a website in ACS
For a webpage, this ACS citation generator appends the access date in parentheses automatically. The date below is this example's write-up date — the live tool always stamps the date you actually run it:
(1) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Diabetes Basics. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/basics/index.html (accessed 2026-08-12).
Frequently Asked Questions
What edition of the ACS Style Guide does this generator use?
Why is the year bold in ACS citations?
Does ACS style use superscript numbers?
Can I generate an ACS citation from just a DOI or a URL?
Is my search or text sent to Akmon's servers?
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