ACS Citation Generator

About American Chemical Society

ACS style is defined by the ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication (the 4th edition went live in 2020, replacing the 3rd edition ACS Style Guide). It's the working standard for every journal published by the American Chemical Society — JACS, Inorganic Chemistry, Organic Letters, Analytical Chemistry, Chemical Reviews, and dozens more. ACS supports three in-text systems: numbered superscript, numbered italic in parentheses, and author-date. The generator defaults to the numbered superscript form, which is the most common in submitted manuscripts.

Example ACS reference

(1) Tversky, A.; Kahneman, D. Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science 1974, 185 (4157), 1124–1131.

In-text citation in ACS

ACS supports three in-text forms: numbered superscript (¹), numbered italic in parentheses (1), and author-date ((Author, Year)). Superscript is the most common — pick it unless your journal specifies otherwise. Reference numbers appear in the order first cited; reused citations reuse the same number.

Catalysis improves yield.¹

Reference-list format

Reference-list entries number in citation order. Author names are surname plus initials, semicolon-separated. Article titles use title case (this differs from AMA and APA, which use sentence case). The journal name is italicized and abbreviated using the CASSI (Chemical Abstracts Service Source Index) format. The year is bold. The volume number is italicized. The issue follows in parentheses, then the page range with an en-dash.

Common ACS mistakes to avoid

• Don't sentence-case article titles — ACS uses title case ("Judgment Under Uncertainty," not "Judgment under uncertainty").
• Don't bold the volume — ACS bolds the year, italicizes the volume.
• Don't spell out journal names — use the CASSI abbreviation (J. Am. Chem. Soc., not Journal of the American Chemical Society).
• Don't omit the semicolon between authors — ACS uses semicolons, not commas (Tversky, A.; Kahneman, D.).
• Don't number references alphabetically — ACS orders by first citation in the text.

How the generator works

Each input goes through the right source. DOIs hit Crossref directly, since that's where they're registered. ISBNs resolve through library and publisher records. URLs get scraped for embedded metadata (DOI in the source, OG tags, schema.org). If nothing's there, we fall back to Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex. Once the canonical record lands, the CSL engine renders the citation in ACS. That's the same engine Zotero and Mendeley run, the same one behind most journal submission portals.