CitationWithSourcesHow formats are sourced

APA Citation Generator (7th Edition)

Fill in what you know about the source and get the APA 7th edition entry plus its matching in-text form. Blank fields are simply left out rather than leaving stray punctuation behind.

Authors

No personal author? Leave these blank and use the organisation field below.

Reference entry

Baniya, S., & Weech, S. (2019). Data and experience design: Negotiating community-oriented digital research with service-learning. Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement, 6(1), 11–16. https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284316979

In-text (parenthetical)

(Baniya & Weech, 2019)

Formatted as APA 7th edition. Italics are shown as italics here and stripped when you copy, so the text pastes cleanly into a word processor where you can re-apply them.

A worked example

A two-author journal article with a DOI, formatted as APA 7th edition. This is generated by the same code the tool above uses, so it is never out of step with the generator.

Reference

Baniya, S., & Weech, S. (2019). Data and experience design: Negotiating community-oriented digital research with service-learning. Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement, 6(1), 11–16. https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284316979

In-text (parenthetical)

(Baniya & Weech, 2019)

The same style applied to a single-author book, where the fields available are quite different — no volume, no issue, no DOI, but a publisher instead:

Gleick, J. (1987). Chaos: Making a New Science. Penguin.

In-text: (Gleick, 1987)

Where these rules come from

Citation formats are only useful if they match what the style body actually publishes, so each rule here is transcribed from a cited source rather than written from memory:

Frequently Asked Questions

When does APA use “et al.” in the text?

From the very first citation, whenever a work has three or more authors — APA 7 dropped the old rule where you listed everyone the first time. A two-author work always names both. Note the punctuation: only “al” takes a period, never “et”.

Why does the in-text citation sometimes use “&” and sometimes “and”?

Position decides it. Inside parentheses APA uses an ampersand — (Wegener & Petty, 1994) — but in narrative text, where the names are part of your sentence, it spells out the word: Wegener and Petty (1994) found that…

Why is the article title in sentence case but the journal name in title case?

That asymmetry is deliberate in APA. Article and book titles take sentence case, capitalising only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns. The journal name keeps its own title case and is italicised along with the volume number.

What happens with more than twenty authors?

Up to twenty authors are listed in full. At twenty-one or more, APA lists the first nineteen, inserts an ellipsis, and then gives the final author — the last name is always shown, so the entry ends with a real person rather than trailing off.

Where do these formatting rules come from?

Every rule on this page is transcribed from the published APA 7th edition guidance listed in the sources box below, and the site's test suite reproduces those sources' own worked examples exactly. If a change ever stopped matching a real published citation, the tests would fail.

Should I check the output before submitting it?

Yes. A generator handles the common shapes of a source well, but real bibliographies contain awkward cases — a chapter in a translated edition, a report with a corporate author and a series number, a source with no date. Treat the output as a well-formed draft and check anything unusual against your style manual or your institution's guidance.

Other citation styles

Switching styles changes more than punctuation — name order, date position and title capitalisation all move, so the same source looks quite different in each.