APA citation generator (7th edition)

The generator follows the 7th edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. The basic patterns:

• Book: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the book (Xth ed.). Publisher.
• Journal article: Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Year). Title of the article. Journal Name, Volume(Issue), pages. https://doi.org/xx.xxxx
• Website: Author or Organization. (Year, Month Day). Title of the page. Site Name. URL
• Book chapter: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the chapter. In E. E. Editor (Ed.), Title of the book (pp. xx–xx). Publisher.

Example: Strunk, W., & White, E. B. (1999). The elements of style (4th ed.). Allyn and Bacon.

Italics are applied to the right parts automatically, and the copy button keeps them when you paste into Word or Google Docs.

Paste a DOI (for example 10.1038/nature12373, or the full https://doi.org link) to pull the authors, title, journal, volume, issue, pages and year from Crossref, the main DOI registry for journal articles. Paste an ISBN (10 or 13 digits, with or without hyphens) to look up a book in Open Library, with Google Books as a backup.

The lookup goes straight from your browser to those public databases. Always review the result: databases sometimes store titles in all caps, split names incorrectly or omit the edition. APA uses sentence case for article and book titles (only the first word, the first word after a colon and proper nouns are capitalized) but title case for journal names.

Below each reference you get the matching parenthetical citation:

Authors	In-text citation
One	(Smith, 2020)
Two	(Smith & Garcia, 2020)
Three or more	(Smith et al., 2020)
Group author	(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2023)
No date	(Smith, n.d.)

In running text, use "and" instead of the ampersand: Smith and Garcia (2020) found… Add a page number for direct quotes: (Smith, 2020, p. 14).

Type one author per line as Last name, First name, for example "Garcia, Maria Elena". The generator turns given names into initials (M. E.) and joins authors with commas and an ampersand. If you leave out the comma, the last word is treated as the last name, so "Maria Garcia" also works. APA 7 lists up to 20 authors in the reference; with 21 or more, it lists the first 19, an ellipsis and the final author, which the generator handles automatically.

For reports and web pages written by an organization, leave Authors empty and fill in Group author, such as the agency or company name.

Click + Add to reference list to collect sources as you go. The list is sorted alphabetically by first author, as APA requires, and Copy all copies it with italics and hanging indents. You can also download it as a text file. The list is saved only in your browser, so it survives a page reload but stays private.

In your paper, start the reference list on a new page titled References, double-space it and use a 0.5-inch hanging indent. Always check your instructor's or journal's guidelines, which may differ from the general APA rules. For a word count of your paper, try the word counter.