APA Citation Generator

What changed in the 7th edition

The 2019 revision removed several rules people still apply from memory. Publisher location is no longer included, so "New York, NY: Routledge" is now just "Routledge". DOIs are formatted as full URLs beginning https://doi.org/ rather than prefixed with "doi:". "Retrieved from" is dropped before URLs unless a retrieval date is genuinely needed. Up to twenty authors are now listed before the ellipsis, where the 6th edition cut off at seven. A reference produced from 6th edition habits looks subtly wrong throughout.

In-text citation mechanics

Parenthetical: (Smith, 2020). Narrative: Smith (2020) argued. Two authors always keep both names joined by an ampersand inside parentheses and "and" in narrative text. Three or more authors use "et al." from the very first citation — the 6th edition rule of listing all authors the first time is gone. Direct quotations require a page number; paraphrases do not, though APA encourages one.

The hanging indent

Every reference-list entry has its first line flush left and subsequent lines indented by half an inch. This is a paragraph setting, not manual line breaks, and using spaces or returns to fake it breaks the moment the document reflows. Entries are alphabetised by the first author's surname, and the list is titled "References", centred and bold.

Author names and the sentence-case trap

Authors appear as surname then initials with a comma and full stops: Smith, J. A. Article and book titles use sentence case, capitalising only the first word, the first word after a colon and proper nouns. Journal titles use title case and are italicised, as is the volume number. Mixing these up is the most common formatting error, and it is visible at a glance to anyone marking the work.

Sources without an author or date

Move the title into the author position when there is no author; use the organisation name for corporate authors. When no date is available, use (n.d.) in both the reference and the in-text citation. A source with neither an author nor a date is worth a second look before citing it at all — that combination is characteristic of material that will not survive scrutiny.

Check the generated output

Any generator, including this one, works from the metadata you supply, and metadata from databases is frequently wrong: missing DOIs, wrong capitalisation, authors as initials only. The generator formats correctly; it cannot know your source's details are incorrect. Read the output against the actual source before submitting.

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