FAQ

Features

Automatic lookup of journals, books and webpages
Easy cut and paste and export to MS Word
Ability to change at any time from APA to MLA or Chicago
Citations are kept and can be accessed from this computer as long as you keep visiting the site. After four days of inactivity citations will be deleted.
Free Account Sign up: Create an account and your citations can be accessed from any computer. Create multiple bibliographies. Your existing citations will be brought into your account.
In-text citation generator with guide • Title page generator • Style Guide
Supports APA 6th edition, MLA 8th edition and Chicago 16th edition.

Downloadable logos

The following logos can be downloaded and used on your website to promote Citefast as an educational resource.

Questions

Answers

About us

How did Citefast start?
While at university studying Computer Science, Alan Cole noticed how creating citations was slow and error prone. He decided to design and program a citation generator that could help students with their citations and in 2008 Citefast was born. Originally it was designed and programmed solely by Alan Cole.

Within a few years, the traffic on the website had grown to a significant size. Alan started working on the website full time. He also recruited his mother Lucy Cole, a web programmer to help with the development of the site. New features such as website lookup, book lookup, journal lookup, footnotes, account creation (with multiple bibliographies), bibliography management were added to the site.

Over a decade old, Citefast is visited by millions of students/professionals every year.
How accurate is your citation generator?
On average 110,000 citations are created every day. More than one every second! So accuracy is a must for us. We have spent a lot of time reviewing the citations and cross checking them with the official manuals. We receive very few complaints about citations being formatted incorrectly, even though some professors love digging through bibliographies looking for errors.

Occasionally when someone does email us telling us our site has formatted a citation incorrectly, this has been, from not reading our tool tips/warning messages. Unfortunately some information such as sentence case titles or choosing when to use date accessed cannot be generated automatically.

We have tried our best to make sure people never miss a warning message while still maintaining the ease of use of our website. Please pay attention to the tool tips and messages!
Why do you keep all features free?
By keeping it free we hope that people will come back and recommend the site to others. Hopefully in the future most applications online will be free, supplemented with advertisement and donations. Advertisement and donations are the only income of the site, and we plan to keep it that way!
What is the future of the website?
Updating to current manuals is always an ongoing process. We are always working on new features to improve the website. Stay tuned! We are also looking to work with directly with more schools. If you would like an ad free version for your educational institution please contact us.

Creating Citations

Help! How do I make citations on your site?
- Select source.
- Cite a book, article, website, or film, by searching or entering the information yourself. Click on the "Save citation" button when finished.
- View your citation in the bibliography on the right and continue citing.
- Export your bibliography to Word or copy/paste into your paper
How long will my citations be saved?

If you have an account, citations will be kept indefinitely.
No account: If you keep visiting the site your citations will be saved, otherwise after four days of inactivity your citations will be deleted.
All my research is done on the web can I cite everything as a web document?

Only unpublished web documents should be cited as Webpages. Check all the other categories to find which source you should chose
Other websites want to charge me and offer less than what you offer for free.

Due to the popularity of the website we are able to offer the service for free, we currently generate all our revenue from advertising revenue and affiliate marketing. We are able to do this because of the popularity of the site and the support of our users.
Can you explain more about the functionality of the website?
Citefast formats your bibliographies and title pages, in APA 6th edition, MLA 8th edition and Chicago 16th edition. Hover over the blue question marks for citation tips. We are constantly upgrading the website to conform to the most recent citation guidelines. To make your task easier we have recently added new functionality.
- automatic citation lookup
- increased source selection
- editing capabilities
- expanded copy/paste function
What APA, MLA and Chicago formats does Citefast use?
Citefast is based upon the following guides:

APA - Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th edition
MLA - MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 8th edition
Chicago - The Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition)

Bibliographies and Accounts

I have already made twenty citations. How can I move them into my account?

Your citations will automatically be moved into your account when you sign up.
How can I copy citations from one bibliography to a new bibliography?

Go to the Manage bibliographies page. Click on Create New bibliography. Create the bibliography. Now select the bibliography from the dropdown in the right panel. Click on "« add" next to the citations that you want to copy.
How do I rename a bibliography?

Click on the name of the bibliography to the left of '(About bibliographies)'.
How long will my citations be saved?

If you create an account, citations will be kept indefinitely.
What can I do in the Manage bibliographies page?
- Create a new bibliography
- Copy citations from one bibliography to another bibliography
- Delete a bibliography
- Rename a bibliography
- Delete individual citations

More information

Citefast currently reaches millions of users worldwide yearly and has been featured on the web in numerous educational sites.

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to contact us using the contact form.

Thank you for visiting.