APA Citation Generator
Enter your source details and get a correctly formatted APA 7th-edition reference, plus the matching in-text citation, in seconds. Built for the essays, lab reports, literature reviews and dissertations that follow APA — with a live preview you can copy straight into your reference list.
Used in: Psychology, education, nursing, business and the social sciences — APA is the most widely required style across university coursework.
Enter your source
Or fill the form yourself below. A bare web address can’t be looked up in the browser — paste its DOI instead.
Source type
A peer-reviewed article in an academic journal.
Author
Digital Object Identifier, if the source has one.
Year published
Add an author or a title and your formatted APA citation appears here instantly.
Author–date in parentheses: (Surname, Year), e.g. (Tulving & Thomson, 1973). Add a page for a direct quotation: (Tulving, 1973, p. 14).
Alphabetical by first author’s surname with a hanging indent. Names are inverted with initials; article and book titles take sentence case; journal names and book titles are italicised.
- Use “&” inside parentheses and in the reference list, but “and” in running text.
- Three or more authors → first author + “et al.” in every in-text citation.
- Article, chapter and book titles take sentence case; journal and newspaper names take title case.
- Give the DOI as a full https://doi.org/ link with no full stop after it.
- List up to 20 authors in the reference list; for 21+, give the first 19, an ellipsis, then the final author.
Your reference list is empty. Build a citation above and choose “Add to list” to collect your sources here, correctly ordered and ready to copy or export.
APA referencing at a glance
APA is the author–date system used across psychology, education, nursing, business and the wider social sciences. Before you build a reference list, fix these four anchors in your head — every entry on this page follows them.
Sentence case for titles
Article, chapter and book titles capitalise only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns. Journal and newspaper names keep title case and are italicised.
First author + “et al.”
For three or more authors, every in-text citation shortens to the first author followed by “et al.” — the full author list still appears once, in the reference entry.
DOIs as clean links
A DOI is presented as a full https://doi.org/… link with no “DOI:” label and no full stop after it — the cornerstone of the APA 7 online rules below.
Digital sources & DOIs in APA 7
More than half of a typical reference list is now online sources, and APA 7 rewrote the rules for them. This is where most marks are lost — so it gets its own breakdown.
Retrieved from doi:10.1037/h0020071.- “Retrieved from” is no longer used for stable sources.
- The bare
doi:prefix is dropped. - A trailing full stop breaks the clickable link.
https://doi.org/10.1037/h0020071- A full hyperlink, ready to click.
- No label, no prefix — the link is the DOI.
- No closing full stop after the URL.
Always https://doi.org/ — never dx.doi.org or a publisher mirror.
The 10.xxxx prefix identifies the publisher who registered the work.
The unique item string — copy it exactly, including case and punctuation.
… (3rd ed.). University of Chicago Press. — with no “New York, NY:” in front of it.Inside a journal-article reference
The journal article is the workhorse of an APA reference list. Read it left to right — each labelled segment is one rule you can reuse on every article you cite.
- 1Author(s)
Tulving, E., & Thomson, D. M.Surnames first, then initials. Up to 20 authors, with “&” before the last.
- 2Year
(1973).Publication year in parentheses, closed by a full stop.
- 3Article title
Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory.Sentence case — only the first word and proper nouns are capitalised.
- 4Journal name
Psychological Review,Title case and italicised.
- 5Volume(Issue)
80(5),Volume italicised; issue number in parentheses, not italic.
- 6Page range
352–373.Full range with an en dash.
- 7DOI
https://doi.org/10.1037/h0020071A full DOI link, with no full stop after it.
Parenthetical vs narrative — and quoting
APA gives you two ways to cite the same source in running text. Choose by where you want the emphasis: on the evidence (parenthetical) or on the author (narrative).
Parenthetical
The author and year sit in brackets at the end of the sentence — best when the finding matters more than who reported it. Use an ampersand between two authors.
Memory is shaped by retrieval cues (Smith, 2020).Narrative
The author becomes part of your sentence with the year in brackets after the name — best when you are building on a specific researcher’s argument. Use “and”, not “&”.
Smith (2020) argued that retrieval cues shape memory.(Kuhn, 1996, p. 23). Use p. for one page and pp. for a range, e.g. (Kuhn, 1996, pp. 23–25). The reference-list entry stays the same.| Authors | Parenthetical | Narrative |
|---|---|---|
| One author | (Smith, 2020) | Smith (2020) |
| Two authors | (Smith & Jones, 2020) | Smith and Jones (2020) |
| Three or more | (Smith et al., 2020) | Smith et al. (2020) |
Reference templates by source type
One row per source you are likely to cite: the skeleton pattern with placeholders, and a fully formatted APA 7 example you can mirror.
| Source | Template & example |
|---|---|
| Journal article | Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the article. Journal Name, Volume(Issue), pages. https://doi.org/xxxxTulving, E., & Thomson, D. M. (1973). Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory. Psychological Review, 80(5), 352–373. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0020071 |
| Book | Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the book (ed.). Publisher.Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions (3rd ed.). University of Chicago Press. |
| Book chapter | Author, A. A. (Year). Title of chapter. In E. Editor (Ed.), Book title (pp. xx–xx). Publisher.McGann, J. J. (1997). The rationale of hypertext. In D. C. Greetham (Ed.), Electronic text: Investigations in method and theory (pp. 19–46). Oxford University Press. |
| Website | Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of the page. Site Name. URLCherry, K. (2022, June 10). How human memory works. Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/how-memory-works-2795000 |
| Newspaper article | Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of the article. Newspaper Name. URLCarrington, D. (2021, November 13). World leaders strike landmark climate deal at COP26. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/13/cop26-climate-deal |
| Online video | Uploader. (Year, Month Day). Title of the video [Video]. Platform. URLVeritasium. (2020, April 2). The science of thermodynamics [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb-zVtJf9Hk |
| Conference paper | Author, A. A. (Year). Title of paper. In Proceedings Name (pp. xx–xx). Publisher.Vaswani, A., & Shazeer, N. (2017). Attention is all you need. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (pp. 5998–6008). Curran Associates. |
| Thesis / dissertation | Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the thesis [Doctoral dissertation, Institution]. Archive/URLDoe, J. A. (2019). Essays on monetary policy and inflation expectations [Doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford]. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:example |
| Report | Organisation. (Year). Title of the report (No. xx). Publisher (if different from author).World Health Organization. (2023). World health statistics 2023: Monitoring health for the SDGs (No. 24). https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240074323 |
Common APA mistakes — and the fix
These are the slips markers see most often. Each pair shows the wrong form, the corrected form, and the rule that explains the change.
Smith, John. (2021). The book title.Smith, J. (2021). The book title.Why: APA uses initials for given names, never the full first name.
(Smith, Jones, & Lee, 2020) for every citation.(Smith et al., 2020)Why: With three or more authors, APA shortens to the first author + “et al.” in every in-text citation.
Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory.Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory.Why: Article and book titles take sentence case in APA — not title case.
Psychological review, 80(5), 352–373.Psychological Review, 80(5), 352–373.Why: Journal names take title case and are italicised.
(3rd ed.). New York, NY: University of Chicago Press.(3rd ed.). University of Chicago Press.Why: APA 7 dropped the place of publication — give the publisher name only.
Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1037/h0020071.https://doi.org/10.1037/h0020071Why: APA 7 removed “Retrieved from” for DOIs and adds no full stop after the link.
A sample APA reference list
Your References page lists every cited source alphabetically by the first author’s surname, double-spaced, with a hanging indent — the first line flush left and every following line indented.
Cherry, K. (2022, June 10). How human memory works. Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/how-memory-works-2795000Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions (3rd ed.). University of Chicago Press.Tulving, E., & Thomson, D. M. (1973). Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory. Psychological Review, 80(5), 352–373. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0020071World Health Organization. (2023). World health statistics 2023: Monitoring health for the SDGs (No. 24). https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240074323
The hanging indent shown here is illustrative — in your document, set it through your word processor’s paragraph settings rather than typing spaces.
APA Citation Generator — questions
Which APA edition does this generator use?+
It follows APA 7th edition (published 2020), the current standard for almost every course that uses APA. The 7th edition changed several rules from the 6th — for example, it dropped the place of publication for books and lets you list up to 20 authors before truncating.
How do I cite a source with no author in APA?+
Move the title into the author position and order the entry alphabetically by that title. In text, cite a shortened title in the author slot — for a webpage or article use double quotation marks, e.g. ("Climate report," 2023); for a book or report italicise it.
When do I use “et al.” in APA?+
In every in-text citation for a work with three or more authors, give only the first author followed by “et al.” In the reference list, list all authors up to 20; for 21 or more, give the first 19, an ellipsis, then the final author.
Should APA titles be in sentence case or title case?+
Article, chapter, book, report and webpage titles take sentence case — capitalise only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns. Journal and newspaper names take title case and are italicised. This tool applies the correct case to each field automatically.
How should I present a DOI or URL?+
Give the DOI as a full link in the form https://doi.org/10.xxxx, with no full stop after it. If there is no DOI, use the article’s stable URL. APA 7 no longer requires the label “DOI:” or the words “Retrieved from” for most sources.
Do I need to include the place of publication for a book?+
No. APA 7th edition removed the publisher’s location, so a book reference ends with the publisher’s name only — for example, “… (3rd ed.). University of Chicago Press.”
How do I add a page number for a direct quotation?+
Put the page in the in-text citation after the year: (Kuhn, 1996, p. 23). Use “p.” for a single page and “pp.” for a range, e.g. (Kuhn, 1996, pp. 23–25). The reference-list entry itself does not change.
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