APA Citation Generator

This generator builds references that follow APA 7th edition formatting rules. Choose a source type — journal article, book, website, or edited book chapter — fill in what you have, and it assembles a properly formatted reference entry as you type. Author names get converted automatically to APA's "Last, F. M." format, and titles are run through the same sentence case logic used elsewhere on this site. Need title case instead, for a different citation style? That converter is available too.

How are author names formatted in APA style?

APA 7 writes author names as "Last, F. M." — surname first, followed by initials. Two authors get joined with an ampersand: "Smith, J., & Doe, J." From three up through twenty authors, every name is separated by a comma, with an ampersand before the final one. Once you're past twenty authors, APA has you list the first nineteen, insert an ellipsis, then add the last author. You can type each author on its own line in whatever format is convenient — "John Smith" or "Smith, John" both work — and the generator sorts out the rest.

What source types can this generator handle?

Four of the most common ones: journal articles (journal name, volume, issue, page range), books (publisher, with an optional edition), websites (site name plus a full publication date), and edited book chapters (editors, book title, page range). Each type follows its own APA 7 formatting — including which parts get italicized, like journal names, book titles, and volume numbers.

How does APA treat titles and italics?

Article and chapter titles follow sentence case in APA — only the opening word, the word right after a colon or semicolon, and any proper nouns get capitalized. Larger, standalone works — book titles, journal names, website page titles — are italicized, while smaller works nested inside them, like a journal article or a single book chapter, are not. Volume numbers get italicized too. This generator applies both the sentence-casing and the italics automatically, based on which source type you've selected.

How should a DOI or URL be formatted?

Under APA 7 rules, a DOI is written as a full link: https://doi.org/ followed by the DOI number, e.g. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000012. Type in just the bare number ("10.1037/edu0000012") and the generator adds that prefix automatically. If there's no DOI, use the URL of the page you actually pulled the source from instead. One change from the 6th edition worth knowing: APA 7 drops the "Retrieved from" label before URLs, except for content that's likely to be updated or change over time.

What happens if there's no author or no publication date?

No identifiable author? Just leave that field blank — the citation will open with the title instead. No known date? Leave the year field empty too, and APA convention kicks in: the generator inserts "n.d." (no date) where the year would normally go. For web sources, you can leave month and day blank as well if all you have is the year.

What actually changed between APA 6 and APA 7?

A handful of things: the author cutoff before switching to an ellipsis moved from six names (6th edition) up to twenty (7th edition), DOIs are now written as clickable full URLs rather than a bare identifier, "Retrieved from" was dropped ahead of most URLs, and publisher locations are no longer included at all. APA 7 also formally supports singular "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun and reworked how online sources get formatted.

Last reviewed: August 2026