APA 7 Citation Generator

About APA 7th edition

APA 7 was published in 2019 by the American Psychological Association. It replaced APA 6 across psychology, education, nursing, and most social-science journals. The big shifts: drop the publisher location, format DOIs as full URLs, accept singular they, allow up to twenty authors in the reference list before truncating, and require running heads only on student papers when an instructor asks for them. Most syllabi now default to APA 7. APA 6 still shows up on older course handouts and a small number of journals that haven't migrated.

Example APA 7 reference

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

In-text citation in APA 7

APA 7 uses the author-date in-text format: (Author, Year). Two authors get an ampersand inside parentheses (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) and the word "and" outside them. Three or more authors collapse to et al. on the first citation — that's new in APA 7, simpler than APA 6's rules. Direct quotes add a page number: (Smith, 2024, p. 14).

(Tversky & Kahneman, 1974)

Reference-list format

Reference-list entries hang-indent half an inch. Author names appear last-name-first with initials. Titles of articles use sentence case (capitalize first word, proper nouns, and first word after a colon). Journal names use title case and stay italicized along with the volume number. Issue number sits in parentheses, not italicized. DOIs render as full https://doi.org/ URLs without the words "doi:" or "Retrieved from" in front.

Common APA 7 mistakes to avoid

• Don't write "Retrieved from" before a URL — APA 7 dropped that wording. The bare URL is correct.
• Don't include the publisher's location for books ("New York, NY:"). APA 7 removed it. Publisher name alone.
• Don't italicize the issue number in Journal Name, 34(2). The volume is italicized; the issue isn't.
• Don't use "et al." only for six or more authors — that's the APA 6 rule. In APA 7 it kicks in at three or more.
• Don't add running heads to student papers unless the instructor asks. APA 7 made them optional.

How the generator works

Each input goes through the right source. DOIs hit Crossref directly, since that's where they're registered. ISBNs resolve through library and publisher records. URLs get scraped for embedded metadata (DOI in the source, OG tags, schema.org). If nothing's there, we fall back to Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex. Once the canonical record lands, the CSL engine renders the citation in APA 7. That's the same engine Zotero and Mendeley run, the same one behind most journal submission portals.