APA citation follows a simple pattern: every source gets a brief in-text citation (author and year) wherever you reference it, and a full entry on your reference list at the end of the paper. The current standard is the 7th edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, which streamlined several rules around DOIs, publisher locations, and multi-author citations. Once you understand the core structure, the same logic applies to books, journal articles, websites, and even AI-generated content.
The Two Parts of Every APA Citation
APA uses a two-part system. First, an in-text citation appears right where you use information from a source. Second, the full details of that source appear in an alphabetized reference list on the last page of your paper. The in-text citation is intentionally short so it doesn’t interrupt reading. It points the reader to the reference list, where they can find everything they need to locate the original source.
How In-Text Citations Work
Every in-text citation includes the author’s last name and the year of publication. You can present this information in two ways. A parenthetical citation places both pieces at the end of the sentence: (Ahmed, 2016). A narrative citation weaves the author’s name into the sentence itself: “As Ahmed (2016) mentions…” Both formats are correct, and you can mix them throughout a paper for readability.
One Author
Use the author’s surname and the year. Do not include suffixes like “Jr.” in the citation.
- Parenthetical: (Ahmed, 2016)
- Narrative: Ahmed (2016) argues that…
Two Authors
Name both authors every time you cite the work. In running text, join them with “and.” Inside parentheses, use an ampersand instead.
- Parenthetical: (Wegener & Petty, 1994)
- Narrative: Wegener and Petty (1994) found that…
Three or More Authors
List only the first author’s last name followed by “et al.” from the very first citation onward. Note the punctuation: “et” has no period after it, but “al.” does, because it is the abbreviation of “alii.” If shortening to “et al.” would make two different sources look identical (same first author, same year), write out enough additional names to distinguish them.
- Parenthetical: (Kernis et al., 1993)
- Narrative: Kernis et al. (1993) suggest…
Building a Reference List Entry
Every reference list entry contains four elements in the same order: Author, Date, Title, and Source. The specifics of each element change depending on the type of work, but the sequence stays the same.
Journal Articles
For a journal article, the title is written in sentence case (only the first word and proper nouns are capitalized) with no italics and no quotation marks. The source element includes the periodical title (italicized), volume number, issue number, page range, and DOI or URL if available.
A typical entry looks like this:
Grady, J. S., Her, M., Moreno, G., Perez, C., & Yelinek, J. (2019). Emotions in storybooks: A comparison of storybooks that represent ethnic and racial groups in the United States. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 8(3), 207–217. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000185
Books
Book titles are italicized and written in sentence case. If the book has an edition or volume number, put it in parentheses immediately after the title with no period between them. The source element is just the publisher name, plus a DOI or URL if the book is available online. Under 7th edition rules, you no longer include the publisher’s city or state.
A typical entry looks like this:
Jackson, L. M. (2019). The psychology of prejudice: From attitudes to social action (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association.
Webpages
For a webpage, italicize the title and use sentence case. If the author of the page is different from the website name, include the website name as part of the source element before the URL. If the author and the site name are the same (for example, an organization’s own page), skip the site name and provide only the URL, since repeating the name would be redundant.
Formatting DOIs and URLs
The 7th edition standardized how digital links appear. DOIs are now formatted as full hyperlinks beginning with https://doi.org/ rather than the older “DOI:” label. URLs appear without the “Retrieved from” prefix unless you also need to include a retrieval date (which applies mainly to content that changes over time, like a wiki page). Do not manually insert line breaks into long DOIs or URLs. If your word processor breaks them automatically at the end of a line, that is fine.
What to Do When Information Is Missing
Real-world sources sometimes lack an author, a date, or even a title. APA has a specific workaround for each situation.
If there is no author, move the title into the author position. Your in-text citation uses a shortened version of the title and the year: (“Shortened Title,” 2020). Do not write “Anonymous” unless the work is literally signed that way.
If there is no date, write “n.d.” (short for “no date”) in place of the year, both in the reference list entry and in the in-text citation: (Smith, n.d.).
If there is no title, write a brief description of the work in square brackets where the title would go: [Photograph of the solar eclipse]. The description also stands in for the title in your in-text citation.
These strategies can be combined. A webpage with no author and no date would start with the title, followed by (n.d.), then the source. If neither the author, date, nor title is available, describe the work in brackets, write “n.d.,” and provide whatever source information you have.
One special case: if a source has no recoverable location at all (no URL, no publisher, no archive), you cannot create a reference list entry for it. Instead, cite it as a personal communication in the text only: (C. Ramirez, personal communication, March 12, 2025). Personal communications do not appear on the reference list.
Citing AI-Generated Content
APA now provides guidelines for citing generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini. The key principle is that AI cannot be listed as an author because authorship requires a living, conscious person who can consent to and take responsibility for the work. The author of an AI reference is always the company that developed the tool (OpenAI, Google, etc.).
There are two main scenarios. If you are referencing the tool itself, the date is the year of its most recent update, the title is the tool’s name followed by a bracketed description such as [Large language model], and the source is simply the tool’s URL (since the author and publisher are the same entity).
If you are citing a specific chat session, the date is the exact day the conversation took place or concluded. The title is the chat’s title (italicized, in sentence case) followed by a description like [Generative AI chat]. The source includes the name of the AI tool or model and the URL of the chat, if available.
Quick Formatting Reminders
- Alphabetize your reference list by the first element of each entry, which is usually the author’s last name.
- Hanging indent: The first line of each reference entry is flush left; subsequent lines are indented 0.5 inches.
- Sentence case for titles: Capitalize only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns. This applies to article titles, book titles, and webpage titles alike.
- Italics: Italicize titles of standalone works (books, reports, webpages) and periodical names. Do not italicize article titles.
- No publisher location: Under the 7th edition, you drop the city and state from publisher information entirely.
- Ampersand in parentheses: Use “&” between author names inside parenthetical citations and in reference list entries. Spell out “and” in narrative citations within your text.