📚 APA 7th Edition Reference Generator

Semantic Scholar + Crossref Powered • Modern UI • GitHub Pages / Cloudflare Pages Ready

A clean, fast, and accurate APA 7th edition reference generator that combines:

• ⚡ Semantic Scholar Academic Graph API
• ⚡ Crossref Metadata API
• ⚡ Your Cloudflare Worker (to merge and purify data)

Designed to produce fully authenticated, APA-correct citations, including hanging indents, sentence-case titles, accurate author formatting, and complete journal metadata (volume, issue, pages).

---

✨ Features

🔹 1. Manual APA Reference Builder

• Build APA 7 references by entering:

  • Authors
  • Year
  • Title
  • Journal/book/site
  • Volume, issue, pages
  • DOI/URL

• Auto-formatted with hanging‐indent.

• One-click Copy to Clipboard.

---

🔹 2. DOI Lookup (Crossref + Semantic Scholar Merged)

When a user pastes a DOI:

1. The frontend sends it to your Cloudflare Worker.
2. The worker fetches Crossref metadata (precise journal info).
3. Also fetches Semantic Scholar metadata (URLs, IDs, fallback info).
4. Merges both into a canonical paper object.
5. Returns one clean result to the frontend.

This ensures:

• Correct volume, issue, pages (Crossref)
• Accurate title, authors, year
• Stable DOI → URL form
• APA-7 compliant author formatting

---

🔹 3. Keyword Search (Semantic Scholar)

• Query by keywords, title, or author.
• Displays matching papers.
• Click → auto-generate APA reference.

---

🔹 4. Beautiful, Modern UI

• Fully responsive
• Dark, elegant gradients
• Rounded cards
• Professional typography
• Smooth user experience

---

🏗️ Tech Stack

Frontend

• HTML
• CSS (custom modern design)
• JavaScript (modular app.js)
• Hanging-indents via pure CSS

Backend (Proxy Layer)

• Cloudflare Worker for:

  • CORS-free API access
  • Semantic Scholar request signing
  • Crossref calls
  • Data merging & normalization

External APIs

API	Purpose
Semantic Scholar Academic Graph	High-quality paper metadata, authors, links
Crossref REST API	Reliable journal metadata (volume, issue, pages, publication date)

---

📂 Project Structure

/
├── index.html       # Main UI
├── styles.css       # Full UI styling
├── app.js           # All logic: APA generator, DOI search, S2 search
└── README.md        # This file

📝 APA Formatting Rules Implemented

✔ Sentence case title conversion

The Title Of The Paper → The title of the paper

✔ APA 7 author logic

• 1 author → Smith, J.
• 2 authors → Smith, J., & Doe, M.
• Up to 20 authors → list all
• 21+ authors → first 19 + … + last

✔ Hanging indent (true APA structure)

Rendered in the browser exactly like a references page.

✔ Publisher / container rules based on source type:

• Journal
• Book
• Edited chapter
• Webpage
• Generic fallback

---

📸 Screenshots

(later)

---

💡 Roadmap / Possible Future Improvements

• Add BibTeX / RIS export
• Add Chrome extension for “Cite this page”
• Auto-detect APA metadata from webpage content
• Add editable reference list with PDF export
• AI-based citation fixer (GPT-assisted)

---

🤝 Contributions

Pull requests and suggestions are always welcome. If you find unexpected metadata issues, feel free to open an issue — Crossref vs Semantic Scholar discrepancies are common, and we can improve merge logic together.

---

🧑‍💻 Author

Developed by Md Tusar Akon Colorado State University Department of Design & Merchandising

---

⭐ If you find this useful, give the repo a star!

---

If you want a light version, a more playful version, or documentation for students using the tool, I can generate those too.