CiteTools

ACS Citation Generator

Free ACS citation generator for chemistry. Paste a DOI, ISBN, BibTeX entry, or reference and copy an ACS reference in the form of the current ACS guide.

Paste a source to get an ACS reference

ACS citation examples

The same two sources appear on every CiteTools generator page, so you can compare styles side by side.

Journal article

LeCun, Y.; Bengio, Y.; Hinton, G. Deep learning. Nature 2015, 521 (7553), 436–444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539

Book

Kahneman, D. Thinking, Fast and Slow; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

ACS in-text citations

Citation number
1

How ACS formats a reference

  • Every author is inverted, with initials after the surname and a semicolon between names: LeCun, Y.; Bengio, Y.; Hinton, G.
  • The article title is included and takes no quotation marks. ACS accepts title case, sentence case, or the title as published, and CiteTools prints it as the source writes it.
  • The journal name is set in italics, in full or as its CASSI abbreviation, with one form through the whole list. CiteTools prints the name the record gives and never shortens it.
  • The year is bold, the volume is italic, the issue sits in parentheses, and the page range is written in full: 2015, 521 (7553), 436–444.
  • A DOI closes the reference as an https://doi.org address with no period after it. ACS also accepts the form that starts with DOI and a colon.
  • Books set the title in italics, with a capital on every major word, and give the publisher and the year: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. A city follows only when the publisher is little known.

Who uses ACS style

ACS style comes from the ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication, which replaced The ACS Style Guide. The journals of the American Chemical Society follow it, and so do many courses in chemistry, biochemistry, chemical engineering, and materials science. The guide revised its reference rules in 2025: a journal name may stay in full, a title may keep its published capitals, and a book no longer needs a city. A citation in the text is a superscript number or a number in parentheses, sources are numbered in the order they are first cited, and the reference list runs in that order.

Frequently asked questions

Which in-text form does ACS want?

A superscript number or a number in parentheses, which older editions set in italics. The guide also allows the author and the year, a form ACS journals do not use. A superscript follows the punctuation, and a number in parentheses comes before it. CiteTools prints the plain number, so set it as a superscript or put it in parentheses yourself.

Should the journal name be abbreviated?

Either form is accepted since the 2025 revision: the full name, or the abbreviation of the Chemical Abstracts Service Source Index (CASSI), as long as the whole list uses one form. One-word names such as Nature are never shortened. CiteTools does not abbreviate: it prints the name the record gives, which is the full name for a DOI. A PubMed record names its journal by an abbreviation without periods, so write that name out. If your journal asks for abbreviations, look each one up in CASSI.

Does an ACS reference include the article title?

Yes. Older ACS references often left the title out, and some reference lists still do. The current guide includes it and leaves its capitals to the writer, so CiteTools keeps the title as the source writes it. Check a title that holds a formula, because plain text cannot carry subscripts or italics.

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