Never Lose Points on Citations Again with Grammarly’s New Student Tools (2024)

Accurate citations matter, even though they may feel like an afterthought to your research or your actual writing. When they contain mistakes or have missing information, they can lower your grade—or even result in an academic paper not getting published. However, the process of properly formatted, consistent referencing can be time-consuming and hard to get right. There are different citation styles for different disciplines and associated style guides—each with its own set of rules about what info to include and which punctuation to use. And none of it is intuitive. Since two-thirds of students write four to ten citations per paper, a lot of hours are spent (and potential points are lost!) in service of this unavoidable aspect of academic writing.

Grammarly is helping to change this with new citation features that make citing your sources a breeze. These new features meet students’ needs by simplifying the citation process. They also expand on Grammarly’s trusted support for students, which includes grammar and spelling suggestions and plagiarism detection that identifies missing citations. Auto-citations generates citations for online sources in seconds, without your having to enter any info manually or even leave the web page. And when you’re ready to edit your paper, citation style formatting will proofread your in-text and full citations to ensure they’re mistake-free and consistent. Both features were built by expert linguists to ensure the utmost accuracy and adherence to the latest editions of APA, MLA, and Chicago Manual of Style.

The magic of auto-citations

Imagine the following scenario: You’re working on a research paper. You head to an online source and discover something useful that you’ll want to cite in your paper—but what’s different from papers you’ve written in the past is that you no longer need to remember to cite the source. A citation for the article you’re referencing simply appears, formatted and ready to be copied and pasted into your paper!

This is, essentially, what Grammarly’s free beta auto-citations feature makes possible. Currently compatible with the ten most popular source websites—Wikipedia, Frontiers, PLOS One, ScienceDirect, SAGE Journals, PubMed, Elsevier, DOAJ, arXiv, and Springer—auto-citations can create copy-paste-ready citations for millions of research articles. Plus, unlike other citation generators, auto-citations has no ads—so no more dodging distracting pop-ups. This streamlined citation tool saves you time and helps you put all your energy and focus into writing an outstanding paper. It can also lead to better grades, since you won’t be losing points due to inaccurate citations. It’s a win all around.

How to use auto-citations

To use our free auto-citations feature, install the Grammarly browser extension. Anytime you’re reading on a compatible source website, you’ll see a “Get citation” button appear in the bottom-left corner of your screen. Click this button, and Grammarly will present a full citation and an in-text citation for the source you’re viewing, ready and formatted for you to use. If you need to format citations for a new paper in a different style guide, you can easily switch between APA, MLA, and Chicago using the suggestion’s dropdown menu.

Citation style formatting that maximizes your grades

Let’s face it: Even the best writers struggle to catch mistakes in their own work, especially with easy-to-overlook details. It’s common to proofread your citations and confidently submit your research paper, only to have it returned with red marks pointing out missing commas, copy-paste issues, and typos. Perhaps you wrote some of the citations yourself, used a different citation generator, or didn’t copy and paste the entire citation. Now, with Grammarly’s citation style formatting, you can avoid such frustrations. This feature, available to Grammarly Premium subscribers in the Grammarly Editor, Grammarly browser extension, and Grammarly for Windows and Mac, does the proofreading for you and works with APA, MLA, and Chicago style guides. With just a few clicks, Grammarly’s suggestions will instantly flag and help you fix mistakes. Not only will this speed up your work, but it’ll also provide the peace of mind that your citations are accurate and you won’t lose points on avoidable mistakes.

How to use citation style formatting

When you sign up for a Grammarly Premium account and install Grammarly, you can access the feature in the Grammarly Editor. There, Grammarly automatically scans entire documents, detects if you have more than two in-text citations, and asks if you’d like help formatting your citations. It then prompts you to set your chosen style guide: APA, MLA, or Chicago. From there, Grammarly ensures your document’s in-text and full citations are formatted properly. When you start a new document, you can also easily switch to a different style guide via the dropdown menu in a citation suggestion or by adjusting your writing goals. Grammarly will check that your document has consistently formatted citations throughout.

Build a better future

Setting your future self up for success starts now—and Grammarly’s auto-citations and citation style formatting aren’t the only tools here to help. Grammarly also catches grammar mistakes and typos, suggests full-sentence rewrites to improve the clarity of your writing, and recommends stronger word choices to bring your ideas to life. That’s why 94% of students say Grammarly helps improve their grades. With Grammarly, you can stop sweating the small stuff in each assignment and instead focus on getting your big ideas out into the world.