APA Book Citation Generator

How to cite a book in APA 7

An APA 7 book reference has four parts: Author. (Year). Title. Publisher. Edition, translator, editor, and DOI slot in when they exist, but the bones are simple. The big change from APA 6 is that the publisher's city is gone — APA 7 dropped "New York, NY:" and similar location markers entirely. Just the publisher's name. The other update people miss is that DOIs now appear as full URLs (https://doi.org/…) and apply to academic books as much as journal articles.

Example APA 7 book reference

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The four building blocks

• Author — last name first, initials. Up to 20 authors are listed in full, separated by commas with an ampersand before the last. With 21 or more, list the first 19, then ellipsis, then the final author.
• Year — the copyright year of the edition you used. For a translated work, include both: (2003/2018) with the original first, your edition second.
• Title — italicized, sentence case (capitalize first word, proper nouns, first word after a colon). A subtitle gets capitalized after the colon: The book: A subtitle.
• Publisher — name only. No city, no state, no country. APA 7 also dropped "Inc.", "Co.", "Publishers" — just the working name.

In-text citation for a book

Author-date in parentheses: (Kahneman, 2011). With a direct quote, add a page number: (Kahneman, 2011, p. 24). Two authors get an ampersand inside parentheses ((Tversky & Kahneman, 1974)) and "and" outside. Three or more authors collapse to et al. from the very first citation in APA 7 — that's a change from APA 6's six-author threshold.

(Kahneman, 2011, p. 24)

Editions, editors, and chapters

• Specific edition — add it after the title in parentheses: Title (3rd ed.).
• Edited book — list the editor(s) where the author would go and add (Ed.) or (Eds.) after the name: Smith, J. (Ed.). (2020).
• Chapter in an edited book — chapter author and chapter title come first, then "In Editor (Ed.), Book title (pp. xx–xx). Publisher." Switch the source-type pill above to Book Chapter for this template.
• Translated book — add the translator after the title: Title (T. Translator, Trans.).

Common APA 7 book mistakes

• Don't include the publisher's city. APA 7 removed "New York, NY:" and every variant. Publisher name alone.
• Don't write the title in title case. APA uses sentence case for book titles.
• Don't omit the DOI when one exists. Academic books often have one — include https://doi.org/… at the end.
• Don't list the year as the printing date. Use the copyright year of your edition. (Reprints don't count as a new year.)
• Don't switch to et al. at six authors. APA 7 collapses to et al. at three or more.

How the generator works

An ISBN goes straight to library and publisher records — that's the cleanest path because the canonical metadata lives there. A title or "author + title" search hits OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar for the same data plus DOI lookups for academic books. Once the record lands, the CSL engine renders the reference in APA 7: sentence-case title, italicized, edition appended, publisher cleaned of "Inc."/"Co." suffixes, DOI as a full https://doi.org/… URL when present, matching (Author, Year) in-text citation generated alongside.