Political Science
APSA Citation Generator
Create accurate APSA references for journal articles, books, government documents and conference papers. Paste a DOI, ISBN, URL, or title to get started.
Based on the APSA Style Manual for Political Science
Your APSA citation will appear here
Paste a source above to generate a verified reference.
Which one did you mean?
None of these? .
- Free forever
- No sign-up
- Verified data, not AI
APSA cites by author and date
The style follows Chicago author-date: an alphabetical reference list, and parenthetical citations naming the author and the year, with a page after a comma when you quote.
- Paraphrase
- (Putnam 1995)
- Quotation
- (Putnam 1995, 67)
APSA citation examples by source type
APSA follows Chicago author-date. The year comes after the author, journal names are given in full, and the issue sits in parentheses with a space before the pages.
Putnam, Robert D. 1995. "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital." Journal of Democracy 6 (1): 65–78.
Note the spacing: 6 (1): 65–78. ASA runs the same elements together without spaces.
Last, First, and First Last. YYYY. "Title of Article." Journal Name 12 (3): 100–125.
Last, First, First Last, First Last, and First Last. YYYY. "Title of Article." Journal Name 12 (3): 100–125.
The reference list names everyone. In the text this becomes (Last et al. YYYY).
Last, First. YYYY. "Title of Article." Journal Name 12: 100–125.
Books give the city and publisher after the italic title, with the year straight after the author.
Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Last, First. YYYY. Title of Book. 3rd ed. City: Publisher.
Last, First, ed. YYYY. Title of Book. City: Publisher.
A chapter names its own title in quotation marks, then "In", the italic book, the editors and the page range.
Last, First. YYYY. "Title of Chapter." In Title of Book, ed. First Last, 100–125. City: Publisher.
Last, First. YYYY. "Title of Chapter." In Title of Book, ed. First Last, vol. 2, 100–125. City: Publisher.
Last, First. [1957] YYYY. "Title of Chapter." In Title of Book, ed. First Last, 100–125. City: Publisher.
Online sources give the access date before the URL, which matters for political material that changes or disappears.
Last, First. YYYY. "Title of Page." Site Name. https://example.com/page (accessed Month DD, YYYY).
Name of Organisation. YYYY. "Title of Page." https://example.com/page (accessed Month DD, YYYY).
Name of Organisation. YYYY. Title of Dataset. https://example.com/data (accessed Month DD, YYYY).
Legislative and agency material is standard political science evidence and is cited by the body that issued it.
U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. YYYY. Title of Hearing. 118th Cong., 1st sess.
Name of Agency. YYYY. Title of Report. City: Government Printing Office.
Name of Party. YYYY. Title of Platform. https://example.com/platform (accessed Month DD, YYYY).
Name v. Name. YYYY. 347 U.S. 483.
For anything beyond a passing reference to a case, law reviews expect Bluebook rather than APSA.
Conference papers and working papers dominate political science citation, and both must say plainly that they are unpublished.
Last, First. YYYY. "Title of Paper." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, City, Month DD-DD.
Last, First. YYYY. "Title of Paper." Working Paper No. 1234, Institution, City.
Last, First. YYYY. "Title of Dissertation." PhD diss., University Name.
Build your APSA bibliography
- Brown, Tom B., Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, and Arvind Neelakantan. 2020. "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33: 1877–1901.
- He, Kaiming, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, and Jian Sun. 2016. "Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition." Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition: 770–778.
- Jinek, Martin, Krzysztof Chylinski, Ines Fonfara, Michael Hauer, Jennifer A. Doudna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier. 2012. "A Programmable Dual-RNA-Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity." Science 337 (6096): 816–821.
- Vaswani, Ashish, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. 2017. "Attention is All You Need." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30: 5998–6008.
- Saved in your browser Your bibliography is stored locally.
- No account required 100% private. Always free.
- Style-aware sorting Ordered and numbered for your style.
APSA citation rules at a glance
- Reference order Alphabetical by author surname. Same author, several works: oldest first.
- In-text citations Author and year, with a comma before a page: (Putnam 1995, 67).
- Author names The first author is inverted, the rest are not: Last, First, and First Last.
- Four or more authors The reference list names everyone. The text shortens to the first author and et al.
- Spacing Volume, issue and pages take spaces: 6 (1): 65–78. ASA runs them together.
- Government documents Cited by the issuing body, with the Congress and session where it applies.
Checked against the APSA Style Manual for Political Science · Last reviewed August 2026
Read our methodologyCommon APSA citation mistakes
- Using the ASA spacing APSA writes 6 (1): 65–78 with spaces. ASA writes 6(1):65–78 without them. They look alike until an editor checks.
- Writing a colon before a page number in the text APSA uses a comma: (Putnam 1995, 67). The colon is ASA.
- Numbering the reference list APSA is author-date and never numbered.
- Using et al. in the reference list Et al. belongs in the text. The list names every author.
- Citing a hearing without the Congress and session A congressional document is unidentifiable without them.
- Omitting the access date for online political material Party platforms and agency pages change or disappear. The access date is what makes the citation checkable.
APSA quick reference (one page, PDF)
Element order for every source type, government-document patterns, and the in-text forms. Print it, or hand it to a methods seminar.
- Reference patterns for eight source types
- Congressional, agency and party-document patterns
- In-text forms for one, two, three and four or more authors
- The spacing differences between APSA, ASA and Chicago author-date
APSA citation generator FAQ
Is this APSA citation generator free?
Yes. Generate, copy, save, and export APSA citations without signing up. There is no paid tier and no export limit.
Is APSA the same as Chicago author-date?
It is built on it. APSA follows Chicago author-date and adds guidance for political science material: congressional documents, party platforms, polls and datasets.
What does an APSA in-text citation look like?
Author surname and year in parentheses: (Putnam 1995). For a quotation, add the page after a comma: (Putnam 1995, 67).
How is APSA different from ASA?
Mostly punctuation. APSA writes 6 (1): 65–78 and (Putnam 1995, 67); ASA writes 6(1):65–78 and (Putnam 1995:67). Get the spacing right and the rest follows.
How do I cite a court case?
A passing reference can follow the pattern on the government document tab. For sustained legal argument, law reviews expect Bluebook rather than APSA.
Where does the citation metadata come from?
Crossref for DOIs and Open Library for ISBNs. Government documents have no catalogue record, so those you enter by hand using the patterns on this page. See our methodology.
Create your APSA citation now.
Free, no sign-up, and your bibliography stays in your browser.