APA 7 citation rules: a complete reference

The American Psychological Association published the seventh edition of its Publication Manual in October 2019, and the rules took practical effect for most universities in 2020. If your tutor still hands out a worksheet that tells you to write the publisher city, that worksheet is out of date. APA 7 removed publisher locations from book references, simplified DOIs to plain URLs, and added explicit guidance for inclusive language. This guide walks through the citation mechanics in the order you will need them: in-text first, then reference list entries by source type, then the small formatting choices that finishing touches require.

In-text citations

APA uses an author-date system. Every time you draw on a source, the surname of the first author and the year of publication appear in your sentence, either inside parentheses or woven into your prose. A direct quotation also requires a page number, written as p. 23 for a single page or pp. 23-24 for a range. For a source without numbered pages, use a paragraph number (para. 4) or a heading.

A single-author parenthetical citation looks like this: (Smith, 2021). When the author appears in the sentence itself, only the year goes in parentheses: Smith (2021) argued that the effect was small. For two authors, name both every time, joined by an ampersand inside parentheses and the word "and" in running prose: (Smith & Patel, 2021) versus Smith and Patel (2021). For three or more authors, APA 7 simplified the old rule. You now write only the first author followed by "et al." from the very first citation: (Garcia et al., 2022). The earlier sixth-edition habit of listing all authors the first time and then truncating later is gone.

If two of your references happen to shorten to the same et al. form, write out enough additional surnames in each one to make them distinguishable. The seventh-edition manual gives the example of Kapoor, Bloom, Zucker, and Younger (2017) versus Kapoor, Bloom, Brewster, and Younger (2017): you would cite the first as Kapoor, Bloom, Zucker, et al. (2017).

Organisations as authors take the full name on first citation, then an abbreviation if one exists. The World Health Organization becomes (World Health Organization [WHO], 2022) at first mention, then (WHO, 2022) afterwards. Sources with no author at all are cited by a short version of the title, italicised for books and reports, in quotation marks for articles and chapters: ("Climate Adaptation," 2023).

Reference list entries

The reference list appears on a new page at the end of the paper, headed simply References centred at the top in bold. Entries are alphabetised by the first author's surname, and each entry uses a hanging indent of 0.5 inches: the first line sits flush left and every subsequent line is indented. Double spacing applies throughout, including within and between entries. The general pattern is author, year, title, source: who, when, what, where.

Journal article with a DOI

The most common entry you will write is a journal article. APA 7 wants every DOI presented as a clickable URL beginning with https://doi.org/, with no "DOI:" label in front of it. Issue numbers go in parentheses immediately after the volume, with no space, and neither volume nor issue is italicised.

Patel, R. K., & Liu, M. (2021). Working memory load and reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 113(4), 720-734. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000512

Journal article without a DOI

If a journal article has no DOI and you accessed it from a database such as JSTOR or PsycINFO, treat it like a print article and stop at the page range. Database information is not included. If you found the article on the open web, include the URL.

Hartley, J. (2018). Notes on the readability of academic prose. Higher Education Quarterly, 72(1), 41-50.

Book by one or two authors

Books in APA 7 list the publisher but no city or country. The book title is italicised and uses sentence case: only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns take capital letters.

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

Brown, A., & Cheng, L. (2020). Quantitative methods for the social sciences. Routledge.

Edited book chapter

For a chapter in an edited collection, the chapter author and chapter title come first, then the editors with "In" in front, then the book title, chapter page range, and publisher.

Okafor, S. (2019). Bilingual word recognition. In M. Cordoba & T. Park (Eds.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 312-340). Cambridge University Press.

Edition other than the first

The edition number goes in parentheses after the title, in abbreviated form, with no italics: (3rd ed.). Place this before the publisher.

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.).

Translated book

Name the translator in parentheses after the title, give the publication year of the translation in the main year slot, and add the original year of publication at the very end. In-text, cite both years separated by a slash: (Freud, 1899/1953).

Freud, S. (1953). The interpretation of dreams (J. Strachey, Trans.). Basic Books. (Original work published 1899)

Webpage on a news site

For a news article on a website, format the author, full date, article title in sentence case and italics, the site name, and the URL. The full date replaces the bare year only when the source uses one, such as a daily news piece.

Hern, A. (2024, March 12). What the new EU AI rules actually do. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/12/eu-ai-act

Webpage on a stable site without a date

If the page has no date, write n.d. in the year slot and add a retrieval date only if the content is likely to change. Most static informational pages do not need a retrieval date in APA 7.

World Health Organization. (n.d.). Mental health: Strengthening our response. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-health

Government or institutional report

Reports use the issuing body as both author and publisher. If the body is the same in both slots, you write it only once, after the title.

Office for National Statistics. (2023). Labour market overview, UK: December 2023. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket

Conference paper or presentation

Format includes the full date range of the conference, the title of the paper, the conference name and location, and a URL if available.

Nakamura, H. (2022, October 14-17). Transfer learning for low-resource languages [Paper presentation]. EMNLP 2022, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Thesis or dissertation

Indicate the type in square brackets after the title, then the degree-granting university and the repository or database.

Mancini, G. (2021). Phonological awareness in Italian-English bilinguals [Doctoral dissertation, University College London]. UCL Discovery. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10128456

Newspaper article

Print newspaper articles include the section letter and page number; online ones use the URL instead.

Carrington, D. (2023, June 8). Heatwaves now arriving earlier each year, Met Office reports. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/08/heatwaves

Podcast episode

Treat the host as the author. The label [Audio podcast episode] sits in square brackets after the title, then the podcast name in italics, production company, and URL.

Glass, I. (Host). (2022, April 1). The retrievals [Audio podcast episode]. In This American Life. WBEZ Chicago. https://www.thisamericanlife.org

DOIs and URLs

APA 7 made the DOI rule simple. Whenever a journal article or book has a DOI, include it in the form https://doi.org/10.xxxx/yyyy. Do not label it "DOI:" and do not write the older short form. If a source has both a DOI and a publisher URL, the DOI wins. URLs themselves are written without "Retrieved from" in front of them unless you also include a retrieval date.

Hyperlinks in the reference list may be left live and blue or formatted as plain black text, as long as you are consistent. Most journals strip the colour anyway. Do not let URLs break across lines at hyphens you have inserted yourself; the manual is explicit that any hyphen in a URL is part of it.

Hanging indents and spacing

Every reference list entry uses a hanging indent of 0.5 inches. The fastest way to apply one in Microsoft Word is to highlight all your entries, press Ctrl+T (or Cmd+T on macOS), and let the paragraph indentation handle the rest. In Google Docs, select the entries, open Format, Align & indent, Indentation options, and choose Hanging from the Special indent dropdown. Avoid using the Tab key to fake the indent; if you change the font or add an entry, your manual tabs will fall out of alignment.

The whole reference list is double-spaced, including within entries. Do not add an extra blank line between entries. The font should match the rest of the paper. APA 7 lists Times New Roman 12, Calibri 11, Arial 11, Lucida Sans Unicode 10, and Georgia 11 as acceptable defaults.

Quoting and paraphrasing

Short quotations of fewer than 40 words sit inside your paragraph with double quotation marks. Longer quotations of 40 words or more become a block quote: indented 0.5 inches from the left margin, no quotation marks, and the parenthetical citation comes after the final period rather than before it.

Paraphrasing remains the recommended default. APA 7 specifically encourages paraphrase over direct quotation in most of the social and behavioural sciences, since it shows you have understood the material rather than simply reproduced it. When you paraphrase, you still need the in-text citation, and page numbers are now encouraged though not strictly required for paraphrased ideas drawn from a specific part of a longer work.

Inclusive language and bias-free writing

One of the larger non-mechanical changes in APA 7 is its expanded guidance on bias-free language. The manual asks writers to use the singular "they" when a person's gender is unknown or irrelevant, to put the person before the characteristic ("people with diabetes," not "diabetics"), and to use the specific term participants themselves prefer when describing race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disability. These choices are part of APA style now, not optional extras.

What to do next

Try the Phrasit citation generator to produce APA 7 entries from a DOI or ISBN, run your draft through the word counter to check you are hitting the assignment limit, and review common citation mistakes for the errors examiners flag most often.