APA Journal Article Citation Generator

How to cite a journal article in APA 7

An APA 7 journal article reference compresses a lot of information into a tight format. Six fields, in order: Authors. (Year). Article title. Journal Name, Volume(Issue), Pages. https://doi.org/…. The italicization rule trips up most students — the journal name and the volume number are italicized, but the issue number in parentheses is not. The DOI is the canonical link in APA 7; if the article has one, it goes at the end as a full URL.

Example APA 7 journal article 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

The six building blocks

• Authors — last name first, initials. Up to 20 in full, ampersand before the last. With 21+, list the first 19, then ellipsis (…), then the final author.
• Year — the publication year only, in parentheses. For online-first articles, use the year the version-of-record was assigned.
• Article title — sentence case (capitalize first word, proper nouns, and first word after a colon). Not italicized, no quotation marks.
• Journal name — title case, italicized. Spell it out fully — Journal of Experimental Psychology, not JEP.
• Volume and issue — italicize the volume; put the issue in parentheses, no italics. 185(4157).
• Pages, then DOI — page range with an en dash (1124–1131), then a comma, then the DOI as a full https://doi.org/ URL.

In-text citation for a journal article

Standard APA author-date: (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Direct quote needs a page number: (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974, p. 1129). Three or more authors collapse to et al. from the first citation in APA 7 — (Smith et al., 2020), not (Smith, Doe, & Lee, 2020).

(Tversky & Kahneman, 1974, p. 1129)

The italicization rule, finally clear

The volume number is part of the journal's identity, so APA italicizes it together with the journal name as one continuous italic block: Science, 185. The issue number, by contrast, is just a sub-locator within that volume — it sits in parentheses, not italicized. People get this backward all the time: Journal Name, 34(2) is right; Journal Name, 34(2) is wrong; Journal Name, 34(2) is also wrong.

Common APA 7 article mistakes

• Don't write "doi:" or "Retrieved from" before the DOI. APA 7 dropped both. Just https://doi.org/10.xxxx.
• Don't italicize the issue number. Volume yes, issue no.
• Don't capitalize article titles in title case. APA uses sentence case for article titles.
• Don't abbreviate the journal name. Spell it out, no matter how long. (That's APA's rule even when the journal itself uses an abbreviation in its self-citation.)
• Don't omit the issue number when one exists. APA 7 requires it for all journals that use issues, even if they paginate continuously across the volume.
• Don't use a hyphen for page ranges. APA uses an en dash: 1124–1131, not 1124-1131.

How the generator works

A DOI goes straight to Crossref — that's where DOIs are registered and the canonical record lives. We pull authors, journal, volume, issue, pages, year, and the title in one call. If you paste an article title or URL instead, we fall back to Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex, then resolve to the DOI when one's available. The CSL engine then renders APA 7 formatting — sentence-case title, italicized journal-and-volume, parenthetical issue, en-dash page range, full DOI URL — and produces the matching (Author, Year) in-text citation.