APA 7th Edition: The Complete Citation Guide

What APA style is — and who uses it

APA style is the set of writing and citation conventions published by the American Psychological Association. It is the dominant standard across psychology, education, nursing, social work, business and most of the social and behavioural sciences. The current version is the 7th edition, released in October 2020, and it is the one your tutors expect today. If a marking rubric simply says "APA", it means APA 7 unless stated otherwise.

APA does two jobs at once. First, it standardises citation — how you credit the sources behind your ideas — so any reader can trace a claim back to its origin. Second, it standardises formatting — margins, headings, the title page and the tone of academic writing. Most of this guide is about citation, because that is where marks are won and lost, but the formatting essentials are covered near the end.

The underlying logic is worth internalising: APA is an author–date system. Every idea you borrow gets a brief in-text signal made of the author and the year, and that signal is the key that unlocks a full description of the source in the reference list. Get that relationship right and almost everything else follows.

The two halves of every citation

An APA citation is always two connected parts, and they must match exactly:

• The in-text citation — a short cue placed in your sentence, e.g. (Smith, 2020).
• The reference list entry — the full description of that source, listed alphabetically at the end under the heading References.

The rule that catches people out: every in-text citation must have a matching reference, and every reference must be cited at least once in the text. A reference list is not a reading list — it contains only what you actually cited. Markers routinely check this correspondence, and a mismatch looks careless.

In-text citations: parenthetical vs narrative

You can fold a citation into your sentence in two ways, and good writing alternates between them so the prose does not become a list of brackets.

• Parenthetical: the author and year sit together in brackets, usually at the end of the sentence — … retention improved with spaced practice (Smith, 2020).
• Narrative: the author becomes part of the sentence and only the year is bracketed — Smith (2020) found that retention improved with spaced practice.

Use the narrative form when the author is the focus ("Smith argues…"); use the parenthetical form when the idea matters more than who said it. Both are correct; varying them keeps the writing readable.

Handling different numbers of authors

The number of authors changes the in-text format. APA 7 simplified this — the headline change is that three or more authors use "et al." from the very first citation.

Note the ampersand rule: use & inside brackets — (Smith & Okafor, 2020) — but write the word and in narrative text — Smith and Okafor (2020) argue…. It is a small thing that distinguishes a careful writer from a hurried one.

Sources with no author or no date

Real sources are messier than textbook examples, so APA has rules for the awkward cases:

• No author: move the title into the author position. Use italics for the titles of standalone works (books, reports) and quotation marks for parts of works (articles, web pages): ("Adolescent mental health," 2023).
• No date: use n.d. ("no date") where the year would go — (Patel, n.d.).
• No page numbers (common on web pages): for a direct quote, cite a paragraph number, heading or section instead — (Lee, 2022, para. 4).
• Secondary source (you read A's discussion of B, but couldn't get B): cite as (Brown, 1998, as cited in Smith, 2020) and put only Smith in the reference list. Use this sparingly — find the original where you can.

Quotations and paraphrasing

A direct quotation reproduces the source's exact words and always needs a page number (or paragraph for unpaginated sources): (Smith, 2020, p. 14). Short quotes (under 40 words) sit in the sentence in double quotation marks. Quotations of 40 words or more are set as a block quote — a freestanding indented paragraph with no quotation marks, and the citation after the final full stop.

A paraphrase restates an idea in your own words and sentence structure. You still must cite it — paraphrasing is not a way to avoid attribution — but a page number is optional (and is good practice when you are pointing to one specific passage). The skill examiners reward is paraphrasing that genuinely reworks the idea rather than swapping a few words, which strays into plagiarism. Our guide on avoiding plagiarism covers the line in detail.

The reference list

The reference list starts on a new page, with the bold, centred heading References. Three rules govern its formatting:

1. Alphabetical order by the first author's surname. Multiple works by the same author are ordered by year, earliest first.
2. Hanging indent: the first line of each entry is flush left; every line after it is indented by about 1.27 cm (0.5 in). Your word processor can do this automatically — don't space it by hand.
3. Double spacing throughout, with no extra blank lines between entries.

The general shape of an entry is a sequence of four elements — Author. (Date). Title. Source. — each answering a question: who, when, what, and where to find it. Once you can see those four slots, every example below is just a variation on the same skeleton.

Reference examples by source type

These are formatted with hanging indents, exactly as they should appear in your list.

Book

Chapter in an edited book

Journal article with a DOI

Journal article without a DOI (from a database or web)

Web page with an organisational author

Report

Newspaper or magazine article

A few formatting details to notice across all of these: only the first word of a title and subtitle (and any proper nouns) is capitalised for books and articles; journal titles, by contrast, use title case and are italicised along with the volume number. The DOI is written as a full clickable link with no "doi:" label and no full stop after it.

What changed in the 7th edition

If you find an older guide or template online, watch for these differences — APA 6 habits are a common source of lost marks:

• List up to 20 authors in a reference before using an ellipsis (it was 7 in APA 6).
• The publisher location ("New York, NY:") is no longer included for books.
• DOIs are formatted as full links — https://doi.org/… — and the label "Retrieved from" is dropped for most web sources.
• et al. applies from the first citation for three or more authors.
• Student papers no longer require a running head; a simple page number in the header is enough.
• Singular "they" is explicitly accepted, and bias-free language guidance was expanded.

Formatting the paper

Beyond citations, APA expects a consistent document. For a typical student paper: 2.54 cm (1 in) margins, a readable font (11-point Calibri, 12-point Times New Roman and 11-point Arial are all approved), double spacing throughout, and a page number in the top-right header. The title page carries the paper title in bold (three or four lines down), then your name, institution, course, instructor and due date on separate centred lines.

APA uses five heading levels, but most undergraduate essays only need the first two: Level 1 is centred and bold; Level 2 is flush-left and bold. Headings should describe content, not just say "Body". Used well, they make a long paper navigable for the marker — which is always in your interest.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Using "&" in narrative sentences (use "and"; reserve "&" for inside brackets).
• Forgetting the page number on a direct quotation.
• A reference list that isn't alphabetised, or that lacks a hanging indent.
• Citing a source in the text that never appears in the reference list (or vice versa).
• Capitalising every word of an article or book title — only the first word, subtitle and proper nouns are capitalised.
• Leaving "Retrieved from" or a "doi:" prefix in front of links — both were removed in APA 7.
• Listing sources you read but never cited. The reference list is not a bibliography of everything you opened.

Citing AI tools, datasets and software

APA has issued guidance for sources that didn't exist when most reference templates were written. The logic is the same four-slot skeleton — author, date, title, source — applied to new kinds of "author".

Generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT)

Treat the company as the author and the tool with its version as the title. Describe how you used it in your method, and where reproducibility matters, include the prompt in your text or an appendix:

Two warnings worth repeating: a language model is not a peer-reviewed authority, so never cite it as evidence for a factual claim; and many courses forbid its use outright — check your assignment's integrity policy first.

Data set

Software or app

Note the square-bracket descriptor — [Large language model], [Data set], [Computer software] — which tells the reader what kind of source they are looking at. APA uses these descriptors for any source whose format isn't obvious from the title, including dissertations, conference posters and unpublished manuscripts. When in doubt, name the format plainly in square brackets after the title; a marker would far rather see a sensible, consistent descriptor than a guess dressed up as certainty.

Quick cheat sheet

Master the author–date relationship, keep your in-text cues and reference list in perfect agreement, and apply the small rules (ampersands, capitalisation, hanging indents) consistently. Do that and APA stops being a chore and becomes almost automatic. When you're juggling several deadlines, our subject-matched writers handle the referencing for you — accurately, in APA or any style your brief requires.

Frequently asked questions

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