APA Citation Generator

In APA 7th edition, author names use the format "Last, F. M." with the surname first, followed by initials. For two authors, join them with an ampersand: "Smith, J., & Doe, J." For three to twenty authors, list all names separated by commas with an ampersand before the last. For twenty-one or more, list the first nineteen followed by an ellipsis and the final author. Enter one author per line in any format (e.g., "John Smith" or "Smith, John") and the tool handles the rest.

The generator supports four common source types: journal articles (with journal name, volume, issue, and pages), books (with publisher and optional edition), websites (with site name and full publication date), and edited book chapters (with editors, book title, and page range). Each type follows its specific APA 7th edition format, including correct italicization of journal names, book titles, and volume numbers.

APA uses sentence case for article and chapter titles, meaning only the first word, the first word after a colon or semicolon, and proper nouns are capitalized. Standalone works like book titles, journal names, and website page titles are italicized, while shorter works like journal articles and book chapters are not. Journal volume numbers are also italicized. This tool applies sentence case automatically and adds italics where APA requires them.

In APA 7th edition, DOIs are formatted as full URLs starting with https://doi.org/ followed by the DOI number (e.g., https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000012). If you enter a bare DOI like "10.1037/edu0000012", the tool adds the https://doi.org/ prefix automatically. For sources without a DOI, include the URL of the page where you accessed the content. Unlike the 6th edition, APA 7th edition does not use "Retrieved from" before URLs unless the content is likely to change over time.

If a source has no identifiable author, leave the authors field empty and the citation will begin with the title. If the publication date is unknown, leave the year field blank and the tool will insert "n.d." (no date) in place of the year, following APA convention. For web pages, you can also leave the month and day fields empty if only the year is known.

Key changes in APA 7th edition include listing up to twenty authors before using an ellipsis (6th edition used six), including DOIs as full URLs (e.g., https://doi.org/10.xxxx), removing "Retrieved from" before URLs for stable content, and no longer including the publisher location. The 7th edition also uses singular "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun and provides updated formatting for online sources.