ASA Citation Generator
An ASA citation generator formats references in the American Sociological Association style — an author-year system where in-text citations show the surname and year in parentheses, and the reference list gives the year right after the author. It's the standard citation format in sociology coursework and journals. Search by title, DOI, ISBN, or URL, confirm the match, and get a reference-list entry plus its in-text example.
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This ASA citation generator formats references in the American Sociological Association's own style guide, standard across sociology journals, including the American Sociological Review, and sociology coursework more broadly. ASA is an author-year system: in-text citations give the author's surname and publication year in parentheses, and the reference list — sorted alphabetically, not by citation order — puts the year right after the author list, quotes article titles, and italicizes journal and book titles. Run a journal article, a book, or a website through this ASA citation generator and each comes back in that same author-year order.
This ASA citation generator builds the reference-list entry and the parenthetical in-text citation directly from the American Sociological Association'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 ASA citation generator pulls in a source automatically; confirm it's the right one, or type the details in by hand and the ASA citation generator still returns the same correctly ordered result.
Who uses ASA style
ASA style is required by American Sociological Association journals and is the default citation format in sociology coursework at most US universities. If a paper or journal submission specifies "ASA style" or "American Sociological Association format," an ASA citation generator keeps the author-year order and alphabetical sorting consistent across a long reference list.
How to cite a journal article in ASA
This ASA citation generator puts the year right after the authors, quotes the article title, and italicizes the journal name:
Watson, J. D., and F. H. C. Crick. 1953. "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid." Nature 171(4356):737–38. doi:10.1038/171737a0.
The in-text citation names the author and year: the double-helix model was proposed by (Watson and Crick 1953).
How to cite a book in ASA
Feed a book's city and publisher into this ASA citation generator and it follows the same author-year-title order, ending with the city and publisher:
Cormen, Thomas H., Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein. 2009. Introduction to Algorithms. 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
In-text: (Cormen et al. 2009)
How to cite a website in ASA
For a webpage, this ASA citation generator quotes the page title and gives the organization as author when there's no individual byline:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2024. "Diabetes Basics." https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/basics/index.html.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does ASA style number sources or cite them by author and year?
How is ASA different from APA style?
What edition of the ASA Style Guide does this generator use?
Can I generate an ASA citation from just a DOI or a URL?
Is my search or text sent to Akmon's servers?
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