Bluebook Citation Generator
Enter your source details and get a correctly formatted Bluebook 21st-edition footnote, ready to drop into a law-review article, seminar paper or note. This generator covers the secondary and academic authorities you cite most — books, law-review and journal articles, book chapters, reports, theses, websites, newspapers, conference papers and online videos — with the large-and-small-caps and italic typography the Bluebook expects. The Bluebook’s core, however, is the citation of cases, statutes and other primary legal authorities, which sit outside this tool for now: dedicated case and legislation support is coming. Until then, you can rely on it for the supporting secondary sources in your footnotes.
Used in: United States law schools, law reviews and legal practice. If you write seminar papers, journal notes, comments or scholarly articles in a US law programme, the Bluebook academic format is almost certainly the style your editors expect.
Enter your source
Or fill the form yourself below. A bare web address can’t be looked up in the browser — paste its DOI instead.
Source type
A peer-reviewed article in an academic journal.
Author
Digital Object Identifier, if the source has one.
Year published
Add an author or a title and your formatted Bluebook citation appears here instantly.
A raised footnote number after the cited sentence points to a numbered footnote, e.g. “… retrieval cues.¹”. The footnote gives the full citation; later notes to the same source are shortened (often with “Id.” or “supra”).
In academic Bluebook the footnote and the entry share one citation form. Book authors and book, journal, newspaper and website NAMES are set in large-and-small capitals; the titles of articles and other short works are italicised. A journal citation is “Volume Journal Page (Year)”.
- This generator formats secondary and academic authorities — books, articles, chapters, reports, theses, websites, newspapers, conference papers and videos. Citing cases and legislation is coming.
- Author names are in ordinary order with an ampersand before the last of two; for three or more authors give the first author then “et al.”
- Editions use the legal ordinals “2d” and “3d” (not “2nd”/“3rd”): e.g. “(3d ed. 1996)”.
- Keep the full stop after an initial — “Donald M. Thomson” — and use abbreviated months in periodical dates (Jan., Feb., Mar. … Nov., Dec.).
- A journal footnote pins to the first page of the article: “80 Psychological Review 352 (1973)”.
Your reference list is empty. Build a citation above and choose “Add to list” to collect your sources here, correctly ordered and ready to copy or export.
Anatomy of a case cite: 347 U.S. 483, 495 (1954)
The Bluebook's signature is the case citation: a string that pinpoints a decision by the reporter volume it was printed in. Read it left to right and every number, abbreviation and parenthesis lands in a fixed slot. Here is the most famous example in US law, taken apart — so you can read any case cite in your footnotes even while the case tool is on the way.
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 495 (1954)
The case name, italicised, with v. between the parties — first party named, then the opposing party.
The volume of the reporter, then its abbreviation — U.S. for the United States Reports, the official set for Supreme Court decisions.
The page the case beginson inside that volume — the case’s permanent address.
The exact page you are relying on, after the comma — 495 sends the reader to one specific page, not the whole opinion.
The deciding court and the year, in parentheses. The Supreme Court is implied by U.S., so only the year is shown; a lower court is named, e.g. (9th Cir. 2018).
US law cites the printed reporter, not a paragraph number. The pair “volume · page” locates the decision exactly across thousands of bound volumes.
The signal tells the reader how the source relates to your point
A Bluebook citation rarely stands alone. A short italicised word in front of it — the introductory signal — tells the reader whether the authority states your proposition, merely supports it, runs by analogy, or flatly contradicts it. Choosing the right signal is half the craft of legal writing; the ladder below runs from direct support down to direct contradiction.
| Signal | What it tells the reader |
|---|---|
| [no signal] | The cited authority directly states the proposition — quoted or paraphrased in your sentence. |
| see | The authority clearly supports the proposition, but an inferential step is needed; it does not state it outright. |
| see also | Additional authority that supports the proposition — used after you have already cited the main source. |
| e.g., | The cited source is one of many that state or support the proposition; attaches to another signal as “see, e.g.,”. |
| accord | Two or more authorities state or support the proposition, with one quoted and the others in accord. |
| cf. | The authority supports a proposition analogous to yours; a parenthetical explaining the analogy is recommended. |
| compare … with … | A comparison of authorities that, taken together, support or illustrate the proposition. |
| but see | The authority clearly supports a proposition contrary to yours — the contradicting counterpart of “see”. |
| contra | The authority directly states the contrary of the proposition — the contradicting counterpart of no signal. |
- •The signal is italicised, the citation that follows is not. A
cf.orbut seealmost always wants a parenthetical after it explaining the relationship. - •When several sources share a signal, order them by the Bluebook’s hierarchy of authority and join them with semicolons inside a single footnote — not a string of separate notes.
Academic footnotes vs the practitioner format
The Bluebook is really two typographic registers over the same citation content. This generator produces the academic (law-review) format, where citations live in numbered footnotes and certain elements are set in large-and-small capitals. The practitioner format used in briefs and memoranda keeps the same words but drops the small caps for ordinary roman type.
Academic (law-review) format
What this tool produces. Citations sit in numbered footnotes; book authors, book titles and periodical names appear in large-and-small capitals, and article titles are italicised.
1Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3d ed. 1996).
Practitioner (court) format
Used in briefs and memoranda filed with a court. The citation content is identical, but small caps give way to ordinary roman and italic type — so you can adapt a footnote to a brief by dropping the small-caps styling.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3d ed. 1996).
Every source type, with its Bluebook footnote template
These are the secondary and academic authorities the generator above formats for you. Match your source to a row, slot in your own details, and check it against the worked example. Small caps are shown as plain words here; copy as rich text to carry the styling across.
Journal article
Author & Author, Article Title, Volume JOURNAL FirstPage (Year).Endel Tulving & Donald M. Thomson, Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory, 80 Psychological Review 352 (1973).Book
AUTHOR, BOOK TITLE (ed. Year).Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3d ed. 1996).Book chapter
Author, Chapter Title, in COLLECTION FirstPage (Editor ed., Year).Jerome J. McGann, The Rationale of Hypertext, in Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory 19 (David C. Greetham ed., 1997).Website
Author, Title, WEBSITE (Month Day, Year), URL.Kendra Cherry, How Human Memory Works, Verywell Mind (June 10, 2022), https://www.verywellmind.com/how-memory-works-2795000.Newspaper article
Author, Article Title, NEWSPAPER (Month Day, Year), URL.Damian Carrington, World Leaders Strike Landmark Climate Deal at COP26, The Guardian (Nov. 13, 2021), https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/13/cop26-climate-deal.Online video
Author, Title, PLATFORM (Month Day, Year), URL.Veritasium, The Science of Thermodynamics, YouTube (Apr. 2, 2020), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb-zVtJf9Hk.Conference paper
Author & Author, Paper Title, in PROCEEDINGS FirstPage (Year).Ashish Vaswani & Noam Shazeer, Attention Is All You Need, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 5998 (2017).Thesis / dissertation
Author, Title (Year) (Description, Institution), URL.Jane A. Doe, Essays on Monetary Policy and Inflation Expectations (2019) (Doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford), https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:example.Report
AUTHOR, TITLE (No. xx) (Year), URL.World Health Organization, World Health Statistics 2023: Monitoring Health for the SDGs (No. 24) (2023), https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240074323.Common Bluebook slip-ups, fixed
Most Bluebook errors come from carrying habits over from author–date styles — inverting names, using everyday ordinals, or citing a full page range where a footnote wants a single page. Here is each one, corrected, with the rule behind it.
Tulving, Endel & Thomson, Donald M., Encoding Specificity …Endel Tulving & Donald M. Thomson, Encoding Specificity …Bluebook author names stay in ordinary order — given name first — not inverted as in APA or MLA.
Donald M ThomsonDonald M. ThomsonUnlike OSCOLA and AGLC, the Bluebook keeps the full stop after an initial.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd ed. 1996).The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3d ed. 1996).The Bluebook uses the legal ordinals “2d” and “3d”, not the everyday “2nd” and “3rd”.
Endel Tulving & Donald M. Thomson, Encoding Specificity …, 80 Psychological Review 352–373 (1973).Endel Tulving & Donald M. Thomson, Encoding Specificity …, 80 Psychological Review 352 (1973).A journal footnote pins to the first page only; a full range is wrong (a pinpoint reads “352, 360”).
Kendra Cherry, How Human Memory Works, Verywell Mind (10 June 2022), …Kendra Cherry, How Human Memory Works, Verywell Mind (June 10, 2022), …Bluebook periodical dates are Month Day, Year with an abbreviated month — not day-month-year.
Endel Tulving, Donald M. Thomson & Roddy Roediger, …Endel Tulving et al., …With three or more authors a footnote gives only the first author followed by “et al.”
A sample Bluebook reference list
This is how a run of secondary-source citations looks once formatted: each footnote on its own numbered line, mixed source types sitting side by side, every entry closing with a full stop. In your paper these would appear as numbered notes at the foot of the page.
- 1.
Damian Carrington, World Leaders Strike Landmark Climate Deal at COP26, The Guardian (Nov. 13, 2021), https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/13/cop26-climate-deal. - 2.
Kendra Cherry, How Human Memory Works, Verywell Mind (June 10, 2022), https://www.verywellmind.com/how-memory-works-2795000. - 3.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3d ed. 1996). - 4.
Endel Tulving & Donald M. Thomson, Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory, 80 Psychological Review 352 (1973).
(June 10, 2022), then the link.Bluebook Citation Generator — questions
Can this generator cite cases and statutes?+
Not yet. The Bluebook’s core is the citation of primary legal authorities — cases, statutes, regulations, constitutions and legislative materials — and those follow detailed rules and jurisdiction-specific tables that sit outside this tool for now. This generator currently formats the standard secondary and academic authorities: books, journal and law-review articles, book chapters, reports, theses, websites, newspapers, conference papers and online videos. Dedicated case- and legislation-citation support is coming. Until then, format your primary authorities by hand from the relevant Bluebook rules and use this tool for the supporting secondary sources in your footnotes.
Which Bluebook format does this tool produce — academic or practitioner?+
It produces the academic (law-review) format used in scholarly writing, where citations live in numbered footnotes and book authors, book titles and periodical names are set in large-and-small capitals. The practitioner format used in briefs and memoranda uses ordinary roman and italic type instead of small caps; the underlying citation content is the same, so you can adapt a footnote to a brief by dropping the small-caps styling.
Why does the edition show “3d” instead of “3rd”?+
The Bluebook uses the legal ordinal forms “2d” and “3d” rather than the everyday “2nd” and “3rd”. So a third edition appears as “(3d ed. 1996)”. This generator applies the legal ordinals automatically — you just type the edition number.
How are author names handled in Bluebook footnotes?+
Author names appear in ordinary order — “Endel Tulving” — and the full stop after an initial is kept, as in “Donald M. Thomson”. With two authors, an ampersand joins them (“Tulving & Thomson”). With three or more, give the first author followed by “et al.” The generator applies these rules from the names you enter.
When small caps and italics are invisible in plain text, are my citations still correct?+
Yes. The Bluebook’s typography lives in formatting, not in the words: book authors, book titles and periodical names are large-and-small caps, while article and short-work titles are italicised. When you copy a citation as rich text it carries that styling into a word processor; the plain-text version shows the same words without the visible small caps. Both are correct Bluebook content.
How do I cite a source with no author?+
Begin the citation with the title and order it by that title. For an institutional or organisational author — a government body, agency or NGO — give the organisation’s full name in the author position, as in a report issued by a named body. This generator lets you enter an organisation as the author so the citation starts correctly.
What date format does the Bluebook use for online and periodical sources?+
Periodical and online sources — newspapers, magazines and websites — take an abbreviated month in parentheses, such as “(Nov. 13, 2021)” or “(June 10, 2022)”. Books and reports cited by year alone show just the year, as in “(1996)”. The generator applies the abbreviated months automatically from the date you enter.
Other citation styles
APA Citation Generator
Generate accurate APA 7th-edition references and in-text citations for journal articles, books, websites and more.
MLA Citation Generator
Generate accurate MLA 9th-edition Works Cited entries and in-text citations for books, journal articles, websites and more.
Harvard Referencing Generator
Generate accurate Harvard (Cite Them Right) references and in-text citations for journal articles, books, websites and more.
More than just citations
Tutorioo helps you plan, draft and understand your coursework — not just reference it. Free to start.