OSCOLA Citation Generator
Cases, legislation, journal articles and books. Correctly formatted footnote citations and bibliography entries for UK legal writing. Fully usable on mobile.
Paste a DOI, we'll build the citation for you
Works for journal articles with a DOI via CrossRef. Cases, legislation, and books don't have DOIs, use manual entry for those, including ISBN lookup for books.
Alphabetized by author, with real hanging indents. Add citations from lookup, manual entry, or batch results.
How to Use the OSCOLA Citation Generator
From a DOI, an ISBN, or legal source details to a ready footnote and Bibliography entry. Fully usable on mobile.
DOI lookups go to CrossRef, ISBN lookups go to Open Library, both directly from your browser. No account, no tracking, nothing stored in between.
OSCOLA Citation Generator, Free and Online
An OSCOLA citation generator turns a DOI, an ISBN, or a set of legal source details into a properly formatted footnote citation and Bibliography entry instantly. This one looks up journal articles via CrossRef and books via Open Library, then generates both the exact footnote text and the differently ordered Bibliography entry, for cases, legislation, journal articles, books and websites.
OSCOLA works differently from citation styles most students meet first. There is no author-date pairing like (Smith, 2024) anywhere in the text, every citation lives in a numbered footnote instead, and a separate Bibliography at the end lists every source alphabetically by author. This free OSCOLA citation generator tool covers all five source types UK legal writing actually needs, cases, legislation, journal articles, books and websites, each with the specific fields OSCOLA requires, a court and bracket style for cases, a section number for legislation, a pinpoint page for journal articles. Paste a DOI for a journal article and CrossRef fills in the author, title, journal and volume, or paste an ISBN for a book and Open Library fills in the title, author and publisher. Pro Mode adds support for more authors, an alphabetized Bibliography compiler, and export to Word or Markdown.
1Simple vs Pro, What Each Mode Includes
| Feature | Simple Mode | Pro Mode (Free) |
|---|---|---|
| DOI lookup via CrossRef, ISBN lookup via Open Library | Included | Included |
| Manual entry for cases, legislation, journals, books, websites | Included | Included |
| Footnote citation and separate Bibliography entry | Included | Included |
| Bracket convention guidance for cases | Included | Included |
| Support for more than two authors on one entry | Limited to 2 authors | Included |
| Batch DOI generator, up to 10 at once | Not included | Included |
| Alphabetized Bibliography compiler, export to Word or Markdown | Not included | Included |
2OSCOLA, Quick Examples
The detail that catches out the most students is that a footnote and its matching Bibliography entry are not identical, only the author order changes, First Last in the footnote, Last, First in the Bibliography, so the two entries look different even though they describe the same source. Bracket choice for cases is another common slip, square brackets [Year] are used when the citation genuinely needs the year to locate the report, round brackets (Year) when a volume number alone already does that job.
3Where OSCOLA Actually Came From
OSCOLA has a specific origin story with a named creator and a stated motivation, which is unusual among citation styles. According to the Oxford Law Faculty's own OSCOLA page, the style was devised in 2000 by Peter Birks, then Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, who wanted to put an end to what he described as the woeful waste of scholarly time caused by the absence of a national citation standard for UK legal writing. The first version was developed in consultation with Oxford University Press, Hart Publishing and Oxford law students and faculty. After Professor Birks died suddenly in 2004, colleagues Timothy Endicott and Sandra Meredith carried the project forward through further editions, and what began as an Oxford-only tool has since grown into the citation style used across UK law schools and by legal publishers more broadly.
| Question | Quick Answer |
|---|---|
| Who devised OSCOLA? | Peter Birks, Oxford Regius Professor of Civil Law |
| What year was it first devised? | 2000 |
| Who continued the project after 2004? | Timothy Endicott and Sandra Meredith |
| Where was it originally used? | Oxford University Law Faculty only |
DOI and ISBN lookups go to CrossRef and Open Library, both free public registries, directly from your own browser, with no account and no tracking. Manually entered details are never sent anywhere.
4Frequently Asked Questions
Grounded in the Oxford Law Faculty's own documented account of Peter Birks's 2000 founding motivation, not the assumption that OSCOLA arrived as a finished national standard from the outset. The full account is detailed on the Oxford Law Faculty's official OSCOLA page. For other citation styles on this site, see the IEEE Referencing Generator and the full SmallStudyTools.com tool library.
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