An APA citation is a reference list entry formatted under the rules of the American Psychological Association's Publication Manual, 7th edition, published in October 2019. APA 7 is the current standard for most college courses and for journals in psychology, education, and the social sciences, and it replaced the 6th edition from 2010. The 7th edition tightened the rules in several ways students notice immediately: the DOI is now written as a complete https://doi.org/ URL, the publisher location is dropped for books, and the author cutoff moved from seven names to twenty before an ellipsis is used. Each source type — website, book, journal article, or newspaper article — has its own required elements and its own conventions for what gets italicized. Getting those pieces in the right order, with the right punctuation, is what makes an APA reference entry look professional instead of improvised. The APA Citation Generator applies every APA 7 rule for you in three steps, and it runs entirely in your browser so nothing you type is uploaded to a server.
Understanding APA Citation Format
To understand how to get an APA citation, it helps to know what the finished entry looks like. The reference list entry — the citation that sits at the end of your paper — has four core pieces in this fixed order:
- Author or authors, in last-name-first format
- Year of publication, in parentheses
- Title of the work
- Source (the container) where the work lives, plus a URL or DOI when relevant
APA also distinguishes a reference list entry from an in-text citation. The reference list entry is the longer, fully formatted version that goes on your references page. The in-text citation is the short parenthetical you put inside the body of your paper, like (Grady et al., 2019). The reference list entry is what you generate with the APA Citation Generator; the in-text version you write by hand in the sentence where you cite the source.
APA 7 was published by the American Psychological Association in October 2019 and replaced the 6th edition from 2010. Several formatting details shifted between the two editions, and the tool applies the 7th edition rules automatically, so you do not need to remember which change applies to which source type.
The Four Source Types APA 7 Covers
The APA Citation Generator works with four source types: website, book, journal article, and newspaper article. Each has a slightly different structure because what counts as the "container" — the larger work the source sits inside — changes by type. For a website, the container is the site name. For a book, it is the publisher. For a journal article, the container is the journal. For a newspaper article, the container is the newspaper.
What gets italicized also changes by type, and getting the italics wrong is one of the most common APA mistakes. The table below summarizes the italics rule per source type.
| Source type | Container (italicized) | Title (italicized?) | Extra fields |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website | Site name | Only for an independent document on the page | URL, retrieval date (rarely) |
| Book | Publisher | Yes — whole title | Edition, publisher (no city) |
| Journal article | Journal name and volume | No — article title stays plain | Issue, pages, DOI |
| Newspaper article | Newspaper name | No — headline stays plain | Pages, URL |
Once you know the container and the italics rule, the rest of the entry is largely the same: year in parentheses, author names, title, and then the container plus a DOI or URL when available.
How to Get an APA Citation in Three Steps
Getting a properly formatted APA 7 reference takes three steps with the APA Citation Generator. Each step corresponds to a real decision APA forces on you: what kind of source you are citing, what information to record from it, and how the tool formats the final string.
- Select your source type. Choose website, book, journal article, or newspaper article. The tool uses the type to decide what gets italicized and which extra fields to show.
- Enter the bibliographic details. Fill in author names, publication date, title, and the container — the journal, publisher, newspaper, or site name. Add volume, issue, page numbers, DOI, or URL where the source has them. Leave fields blank if the source does not include them.
- Copy the formatted reference. The tool assembles the entry with italics and punctuation applied automatically. Copy it straight into your reference list.
The three steps run locally in your browser, so the article title, author names, and DOI you enter are not uploaded to any server. Every output follows the APA 7 rules documented on the APA Style reference examples page.
Author Names: How APA 7 Wants Them Formatted
APA 7 spells author names out in a specific order and uses specific punctuation to join them. Getting this part wrong is another common mistake, and the rules change depending on how many authors the source has.
| Number of authors | How APA 7 formats them |
|---|---|
| One | "Last, F. M." |
| Two | "Last, F. M., & Last, F. M." — ampersand before the second name |
| Three to twenty | All names listed, separated by commas, with an ampersand before the final name |
| Twenty-one or more | First 19 names, then a spaced ellipsis (. . .), then the final name with no ampersand |
| No author given | The title moves to the author position and the entry begins with the title |
For example, a three-author article by Jane Smith, Alan Jones, and Karen Williams reads "Smith, J., Jones, A., & Williams, K." in the reference list. The 6th edition cut off the author list after seven names; APA 7 raised that to twenty before the ellipsis applies, which is one of the changes students miss when they carry habits from older courses.
If the source has no date, the year becomes "(n.d.)" — the APA abbreviation for "no date." The APA Citation Generator applies both the author-count and the missing-date rules automatically when you fill in the fields.
Italics, Dates, and DOIs: The Small Details APA Gets Strict About
Beyond the author list, three small details are responsible for most APA citation errors: italics, dates, and DOIs.
Italics apply differently depending on the source type. A journal article italicizes the journal name and the volume number but leaves the article title plain. A book italicizes the whole title. A webpage italicizes the title only when the page is an independent document — like a standalone report or PDF — not a short article on a larger site. A newspaper italicizes the paper's name but not the headline. Applying these by hand is tedious and easy to get wrong, so the APA Citation Generator italicizes each part for you and shows the formatted entry inline.
Dates use the format "(Year)" or "(Year, Month Day)" for periodicals, and a missing date becomes "(n.d.)". The year alone is enough for most books and journal articles; newspaper and magazine articles use the year plus the month and day.
DOIs appear as a full URL. APA 7 dropped the "Retrieved from" prefix entirely except in one specific case: when the page has no clear publication date and its content is likely to change. In every other case the DOI is written as a working link: https://doi.org/ followed by the registered DOI string. APA 7 also dropped the publisher location for books — a detail that used to make book citations look like "New York, NY: Penguin", which now simply reads "Penguin".
Reference List Entry vs In-Text Citation — Which One You Need
The APA Citation Generator produces a reference list entry — the longer, fully formatted citation that appears on your references page at the end of the paper. It does not produce an in-text citation, which is the short parenthetical form inside the body of your paper.
An in-text citation looks like "(Smith, 2020)" for a single author or "(Smith & Jones, 2020)" for two. For three or more authors, APA 7 shortens it to "(Smith et al., 2020)" on first mention, with no need to list additional names. You write the in-text citation yourself directly in the sentence where you use the source.
If you need both forms for the same source, generate the reference list entry with this tool, then write the matching in-text citation by hand using the author and year from the entry. The two must agree: every source cited in text must appear in the reference list, and every entry in the reference list must be cited somewhere in the text.
For a deeper walkthrough of APA 7 formatting across specific source types, see the complete APA 7 citation guide.
For a deeper look, see How to Get an MLA Citation from Google Scholar.