CiteTools

APA Citation Generator

Free APA 7th edition citation generator. Paste a DOI, ISBN, URL, or messy reference and copy a correct APA reference and in-text citation. No sign-up.

Paste a source to get an APA citation

APA citation examples

The same two sources appear on every CiteTools generator page, so you can compare styles side by side.

Journal article

LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning. Nature, 521(7553), 436–444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539

Book

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

APA in-text citations

Parenthetical
(LeCun et al., 2015)
Narrative
LeCun et al. (2015)
With a page number
(LeCun et al., 2015, p. 438)

How APA 7 formats a reference

  • Authors are inverted and given as initials: LeCun, Y. An ampersand joins the last two names.
  • The year follows the authors in parentheses, which is why APA is called an author-date style.
  • Article and book titles use sentence case: only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns are capitalized.
  • Journal names and volume numbers are italic. The issue sits in parentheses straight after the volume.
  • A DOI is written as a full https://doi.org link with no closing period.
  • Up to 20 authors are listed. A work with 21 or more shows the first 19, an ellipsis, and the final author.

Who uses APA style

APA Style comes from the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, now in its 7th edition. Psychology, education, nursing, business, and most social science courses require it. In the text, a work with one or two authors names them every time, and a work with three or more is shortened to the first author plus et al. from the first citation. The reference list is double spaced with a hanging indent and sorted by the first author’s surname.

Frequently asked questions

Does this generator follow APA 7 or APA 6?

APA 7. The output follows the 7th edition rules: no publisher location for books, DOIs as https://doi.org links, up to 20 authors listed, and et al. from the first in-text citation for three or more authors.

Can it create the in-text citation too?

Yes. Switch the output from Reference to Citation and CiteTools shows the parenthetical and narrative forms. Add a page number to get a citation such as (LeCun et al., 2015, p. 438) for a direct quote.

What if my source has no author or date?

APA moves the title into the author position when no author exists and writes n.d. when no date exists. CiteTools applies both rules and tells you which field is missing so you can check the source.

Build APA citations from an identifier or file

Convert a reference from another style

Generators for other citation styles

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