CiteIt — Website Citation Generator

A lightweight desktop app that generates properly formatted citations from any URL — no account, no internet subscription, no fuss.

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Features

• 5 citation formats — APA 7th, MLA 9th, Chicago 17th, Harvard, and IEEE
• One-click copy for each citation style
• Auto-extracts metadata — title, authors, publish date, and publisher from Open Graph tags, JSON-LD, and standard meta tags
• Runs offline after the initial page fetch
• Packages into a single .exe (Windows) or .app (macOS) — no Python required for end users

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Screenshots

Paste a URL → press Generate → copy your citation.

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Installation (run from source)

Prerequisites: Python 3.8+

# 1. Clone or download the project
# 2. Install dependencies
pip install requests beautifulsoup4

# 3. Run the app
python cite_generator.py

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Building the Executable

# Install PyInstaller
pip install pyinstaller

# Windows / macOS — single file, no console window
pyinstaller --onefile --windowed --name "CiteIt" cite_generator.py

Output will be at dist/CiteIt.exe (Windows) or dist/CiteIt (macOS).

Note: Some antivirus software may flag PyInstaller-built executables as suspicious. This is a known false positive. You can whitelist the file safely.

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Citation Formats

Format	Example output style
APA 7th	Smith, J. (2024). Title. Site Name. Retrieved 2024-01-01, from https://…
MLA 9th	Smith, John. "Title." Site Name, 1 Jan. 2024, https://…
Chicago 17th	Smith, John. "Title." Site Name. Published January 1, 2024. Accessed…
Harvard	Smith, J. (2024) 'Title', Site Name. Available at: https://…
IEEE	J. Smith, "Title," Site Name. [Online]. Available: https://…

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How It Works

1. You paste a URL and press Generate
2. The app fetches the page HTML in a background thread
3. Metadata is extracted in priority order:
   • Open Graph tags (og:title, og:site_name, article:published_time, …)
   • JSON-LD structured data (@type: Article, author, …)
   • Standard <meta> tags (author, date, description, …)
   • Fallback to <title> tag and domain name
4. Each citation format is rendered and displayed with a COPY button

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Dependencies

Package	Purpose
requests	Fetching page HTML
beautifulsoup4	Parsing HTML and extracting metadata
tkinter	GUI (included with Python)
pyinstaller	Building the .exe / .app (build-time only)

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Limitations

• Some sites block automated requests or require JavaScript to render content — metadata may be incomplete for these
• Author detection works best on news articles and blog posts with proper meta tags
• Paywalled or login-required pages cannot be accessed

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License

MIT — do whatever you want with it.