Template:Citation/doc

The Citation template is a versatile template for citing books, periodicals, contributions in collective works, patents, and web-sites. Its goal is to be an all-purpose citation template. It also has functionality to aid the use of the Harvard referencing style. The template allows author-date ("Harvard") citations in the main body of text to link to a full citation (generated by this template) in a "References" section at the end of the article via the Template:Harvard citation template. This template creates an HTML anchor, linked by #CITEREF followed by up to 4 author/editor last names and the date, to which the Harvard citation and related templates can link.

The template knows whether you are citing a book, periodical, or a chapter in a compilation, depending on which combination of parameters you use. For use with author-date systems such as the Harvard citation template, use of last and date parameters should be considered compulsory, where possible.

Tools
See w:Wikipedia:Citing sources for a list of tools which can help create a reference in the 'citation' format.