Psychology & Social Sciences
APA Citation Generator
Create accurate APA 7th edition references for journal articles, books, chapters, reports and websites. Paste a DOI, ISBN, URL, or title to get started.
Based on the Publication Manual of the APA, 7th edition
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APA cites by author and date
The reference list is alphabetical, and the text points at it with the author surname and the year. A page number is added for a direct quotation.
- Paraphrase
- (Kahneman, 2011)
- Quotation
- (Kahneman, 2011, p. 42)
APA citation examples by source type
The year sits in parentheses after the author, the article title is sentence case, and the journal name and volume are italic. A DOI closes the reference as a full link.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.185.4157.1124
An ampersand joins the last two names in the reference list, but the word "and" is used in running text.
Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191
The issue number goes in parentheses immediately after the italic volume, with no space.
Author, A. A., Author, B. B., [first 19 authors] ... Author, Z. Z. (YYYY). Title of article. Journal Name, 12(3), 100–125. https://doi.org/10.xxxx/xxxxx
List the first 19, then an ellipsis, then the final author. Never et al. in the reference list.
Author, A. A. (YYYY). Title of article. Journal Name, 12(3), 100–125.
End after the page range. A database URL is not a substitute.
The 7th edition dropped the place of publication. A book is now author, year, italic title, edition in parentheses, publisher.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
No city. Publisher only.
Author, A. A. (YYYY). Title of book (3rd ed.). Publisher.
Editor, A. A. (Ed.). (YYYY). Title of book. Publisher.
Author, A. A. (YYYY). Title of book (T. Translator, Trans.). Publisher. (Original work published 1899)
A chapter names its own title in plain text, then "In", then the editors and the italic book title with the page range in parentheses.
Author, A. A. (YYYY). Title of chapter. In E. E. Editor & F. F. Editor (Eds.), Title of book (pp. 100–125). Publisher.
Author, A. A. (YYYY). Title of chapter. In E. E. Editor (Ed.), Title of book (3rd ed., pp. 100–125). Publisher.
Author, A. A. (YYYY). Title of entry. In E. E. Editor (Ed.), Title of encyclopedia. Publisher. https://example.com/entry
Give the full date when the page carries one. A retrieval date is added only for pages designed to change, such as a live statistics dashboard.
World Health Organization. (n.d.). Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cardiovascular-diseases-(cvds)
When the author and the site are the same body, APA prints the name once as the author.
Author, A. A. (YYYY, Month DD). Title of page. Site Name. https://example.com/page
Organisation Name. (YYYY). Title of page. Retrieved Month DD, YYYY, from https://example.com/page
The retrieval date is the exception, not the default. Most pages do not need one.
Grey literature carries a bracketed description of what the work is, which is how a reader knows it was not peer reviewed.
Organisation Name. (YYYY). Title of report (Report No. NNNN). Publisher. https://example.com/report
Author, A. A. (YYYY). Title of dataset [Data set]. Repository. https://doi.org/10.xxxx/xxxxx
Author, A. A. (YYYY). Title of preprint [Preprint]. Repository. https://doi.org/10.xxxx/xxxxx
Theses take a bracketed description naming the degree and the awarding institution, then where you found it.
Author, A. A. (YYYY). Title of dissertation [Doctoral dissertation, University Name]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.
Author, A. A. (YYYY). Title of thesis [Master's thesis, University Name]. Repository Name. https://example.com/thesis
Author, A. A. (YYYY). Title of thesis [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University Name.
Build your APA bibliography
- Brown, T. B., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J., Dhariwal, P., & Neelakantan, A. (2020). Language models are few-shot learners. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33, 1877–1901.
- He, K., Zhang, X., Ren, S., & Sun, J. (2016). Deep residual learning for image recognition. Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 770–778. https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2016.90
- Jinek, M., Chylinski, K., Fonfara, I., Hauer, M., Doudna, J. A., & Charpentier, E. (2012). A programmable dual-RNA-guided DNA endonuclease in adaptive bacterial immunity. Science, 337(6096), 816–821. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1225829
- Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, L., & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30, 5998–6008.
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- Style-aware sorting Ordered and numbered for your style.
APA citation rules at a glance
- Reference order Alphabetical by first author surname. Same author, several works: oldest first.
- In-text citations Author and year: (Bandura, 1977). Three or more authors collapse to (Bandura et al., 1977).
- Author names Every name is inverted: Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. An ampersand joins the last two.
- Twenty-one or more authors List the first 19, an ellipsis, then the final author. Et al. never appears in the list.
- Sentence case titles Article, chapter and book titles take sentence case. Journal names keep title case.
- No place of publication The 7th edition dropped the city. Books carry the publisher and nothing more.
Checked against the Publication Manual of the APA, 7th edition · Last reviewed August 2026
Read our methodologyCommon APA citation mistakes
- Keeping the city in a book reference The 7th edition removed it. Reference lists carried over from the 6th edition are where this survives.
- Writing et al. in the reference list Et al. belongs in the text. The reference list names up to 20 authors in full.
- Using and instead of an ampersand The reference list and parenthetical citations use &. Only running text uses the word "and".
- Title case in an article title Only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns are capitalised.
- Writing DOI: before the link The 7th edition wants a plain link: https://doi.org/10.xxxx/xxxxx, with no label and no full stop after it.
- Adding a retrieval date to every web page Retrieval dates are for pages designed to change, such as a live dashboard, not for ordinary articles.
APA quick reference (one page, PDF)
Element order for every source type, in-text forms for one to twenty-one authors, and what the 7th edition changed. Print it, or hand it to a seminar group.
- Reference patterns for eight source types
- In-text forms for one, two, three or more, and group authors
- The 20-author rule with the ellipsis worked through
- Every difference between the 6th and 7th editions that changes a reference
APA citation generator FAQ
Is this APA citation generator free?
Yes. Generate, copy, save, and export APA citations without signing up. There is no paid tier and no export limit.
Which edition does this follow?
The 7th edition, published in 2019 and required by most departments since 2020. The visible differences are the missing place of publication, the plain DOI link, and et al. from the third author in text.
How many authors before et al. in APA?
In the text, three or more authors become et al. from the first citation. In the reference list, up to 20 authors are named; with 21 or more you list the first 19, an ellipsis, then the last author.
Do I need a retrieval date for a website?
Usually not. Add one only when the content is designed to change and there is no archived version, such as a live statistics page or a wiki entry.
How do I cite a source with no author or no date?
Move the title into the author position, and write (n.d.) where the year would go. The in-text citation then uses a shortened title in quotation marks.
Where does the citation metadata come from?
Crossref for DOIs, Open Library for ISBNs, and PubMed for biomedical articles. Nothing is written by a language model, so a volume or page range is either verified or left blank for you to fill in. See our methodology.
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