How to cite a DOI in APA 7, MLA, Chicago, IEEE and BibTeX
Short answer: look the DOI up, take the authors, year, title, journal, volume, issue and pages from the record, and write them in your style's order — then end the reference with the DOI as a link. In APA 7 that is https://doi.org/ followed by the DOI. The citation generator does the lookup and the formatting from the DOI alone, from indexed records rather than guesswork.
What a DOI is
A Digital Object Identifier is a permanent ID for a published work, for example 10.1038/nature14539. Adding https://doi.org/ in front of it gives a link that keeps working even when the publisher moves the article. Every style below includes the DOI when the work has one.
The same paper in five styles
Example: the 2015 review *Deep learning* by LeCun, Bengio and Hinton in Nature, volume 521, issue 7553, pages 436–444, DOI 10.1038/nature14539.
APA 7
LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning. Nature, 521(7553), 436–444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539MLA 9
LeCun, Yann, et al. "Deep Learning." Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, 2015, pp. 436–44, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.Chicago (author-date)
LeCun, Yann, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton. 2015. "Deep Learning." Nature 521 (7553): 436–44. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.IEEE
Y. LeCun, Y. Bengio, and G. Hinton, "Deep learning," Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, pp. 436–444, 2015, doi: 10.1038/nature14539.BibTeX
@article{lecun2015deep, author = {LeCun, Yann and Bengio, Yoshua and Hinton, Geoffrey}, title = {Deep learning}, journal = {Nature}, volume = {521}, number = {7553}, pages = {436--444}, year = {2015}, doi = {10.1038/nature14539}}In the printed APA and MLA reference the journal name and volume are set in italics; a reference manager or the citation generator applies that for you.
Where to find the details
Paste the DOI after https://doi.org/ in a browser to reach the article, or look it up in Crossref or OpenAlex, which hold the publisher's metadata. Take the title exactly as published — including its capitalisation — and list every author up to your style's limit.
Mistakes that get references sent back
- Writing "doi:" with the old prefix in APA 7, which wants the https://doi.org/ link form.
- Citing the preprint's DOI when you read the published version, or the other way round.
- A DOI with a typo — always open the link once to confirm it resolves to the right paper.
- A reference that matches no real paper at all. Editors increasingly check for fabricated references, which language models are known to produce; building each reference from an indexed record avoids them.
- Inconsistent styles across the list — the BibTeX cleaner removes duplicates and flags entries missing required fields.
Citing the same paper in the text
The reference list is half of a citation; the other half is the pointer in your sentence. For the example above:
- APA 7: (LeCun et al., 2015) — three or more authors are shortened to the first author and "et al." from the first citation.
- MLA 9: (LeCun et al. 437) — author and page, no comma.
- Chicago author-date: (LeCun, Bengio, and Hinton 2015, 437).
- IEEE: [1] — a number in square brackets, in the order the sources are first cited, matching the numbered reference list.
Whatever the style, every in-text citation needs a matching entry in the reference list and every entry in the list needs to be cited. Reviewers notice both kinds of mismatch, and they are easy to make when references are copied by hand from several sources.
Citing in LaTeX
Keep the BibTeX entries in a .bib file, cite them with \cite{key}, and let the journal's bibliography style format the list. Changing journals then changes the reference style automatically — see the IEEE LaTeX template guide for an example.