ACS Citation Generator

What this tool does

This generator builds ACS-style references following the ACS Style Guide, 4th edition (2020) — the citation format expected by journals published by the American Chemical Society. Pick a source type (journal article, book, website, conference paper, thesis, technical report), fill in the bibliographic fields, and the tool produces a copy-ready reference. All work happens on your device.

ACS is one of the strictest citation styles in scientific publishing, with specific conventions that differ visibly from APA, AMA, IEEE, or Chicago. Getting them right at submission saves a revision round.

How ACS citation format works

Three signature conventions define ACS:

Numbered references with superscript inline. Like AMA and IEEE, ACS uses a numbered reference list. Inline citations are italic superscript numbers — as observed by Smith et al.² — keyed to the numbered list at the end of the paper. The number for each source is assigned in the order it first appears in the text, not alphabetically.

Authors are Family, F. M. semicolon-separated. ACS keeps the family name first followed by initials with periods and spaces: Smith, J. M.. Authors are separated by semicolons, not commas (which is what catches most newcomers — Smith, J. M.; Chen, R. B. not Smith, J. M., Chen, R. B.).

CASSI journal abbreviations in italics. ACS journals require the official Chemical Abstracts Service Source Index (CASSI) abbreviation for journal names, rendered in italics. Journal of the American Chemical Society becomes *J. Am. Chem. Soc.*. The CASSI database is the authoritative lookup; the abbreviations are short and consistent across the chemistry literature.

Worked examples

A journal article in JACS:

1. Smith, J. M.; Chen, R. B. Catalytic asymmetric synthesis of spirocyclic ethers. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2024, 146 (12), 8210–8219. DOI: 10.1021/jacs.4c01234.

A book chapter:

2. Wilkinson, G.; Stone, F. G. A. Comprehensive Organometallic Chemistry, 2nd ed.; Pergamon: Oxford, U.K., 2023.

A website (less common in chemistry but supported):

3. National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST Chemistry WebBook. https://webbook.nist.gov (accessed 2026-05-21).

A conference paper:

4. Park, E. J.; Kim, S. Mechanistic insights from operando spectroscopy. Presented at the 268th ACS National Meeting, Boston, MA, August 2024; INOR 245.

A dissertation:

5. Tan, W. L. Mechanisms of olefin metathesis in heterogeneous catalysts. Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University, 2024.

CASSI and the chemistry-specific style

The CASSI abbreviation system is what separates ACS from a generic “numbered references” style. It is maintained by the Chemical Abstracts Service (the publisher of Chemical Abstracts, the field’s standard indexing database) and used uniformly across ACS journals. Some representative abbreviations: Angew. Chem., Int. Ed., Chem. Sci., Inorg. Chem., Org. Lett., Chem. Rev., Acc. Chem. Res., J. Org. Chem., J. Phys. Chem. A/B/C, Nat. Chem., Chem. Mater..

The full title of the journal is wrong in ACS references — the CASSI form is required. If your reference manager (EndNote, Mendeley, Zotero) is configured for ACS output, it pulls the CASSI form automatically. If you are writing by hand, the CASSI database lookup is the source of truth.

Common ACS citation mistakes

Comma between authors instead of semicolons. Authors are semicolon-separated, period. Smith, J. M., Chen, R. B. (with a comma between authors) is wrong; Smith, J. M.; Chen, R. B. is right.

Full journal name instead of CASSI. Journal of the American Chemical Society should be J. Am. Chem. Soc.. The submission system will flag this at peer review.

Forgetting the boldface year. ACS bibliography style puts the year in bold: **2024**. Many word processors render this faithfully; if you are pasting into a plain text submission system, the formatting will be lost — re-apply the bold at proof stage.

Wrong sequence for journal references. ACS uses Journal *year*, *volume* (issue), pages. The year sits between the journal name and the volume. APA puts the year in parentheses near the authors; AMA uses year;volume(issue):pages. ACS’s sequence is distinct — keep it consistent.

Using DOI as a URL instead of a DOI: field. ACS 4th edition prefers DOI: 10.1021/xxxxx at the end of the reference, not a clickable URL. The DOI is the permanent identifier; the URL form is implicit (https://doi.org/...) and not part of the reference style.

Privacy

The generator builds the reference by concatenating strings in JavaScript, locally on your device. There are no fetch calls, no analytics on the values you enter, and no server-side logging.