APA citation is the author-date referencing style of the American Psychological Association, currently in its 7th edition. Unlike numbered systems such as Vancouver and AMA, APA identifies sources in the text by author surname and year, and orders the reference list alphabetically. It is the dominant style in psychology, education, nursing, and the wider social sciences, so most researchers in those fields will use it throughout their careers.
This guide covers the APA in-text citation format, the reference list rules for the most common source types, and the mistakes that most often cost marks or trigger editorial corrections.
APA uses two in-text forms. The parenthetical citation places author and year in brackets at the end of the relevant clause: cognitive load affected recall (Smith, 2024). The narrative citation weaves the author into the sentence with the year in brackets immediately after: Smith (2024) found that cognitive load affected recall. For a direct quotation, add the page number: (Smith, 2024, p. 14).
For two authors, join them with an ampersand in parentheses and "and" in narrative form: (Smith & Patel, 2024) but Smith and Patel (2024). For three or more authors, use the first author followed by et al. from the first citation: (Smith et al., 2024).
The reference list is alphabetical by first author surname and uses a hanging indent. APA capitalises only the first word of article and book titles (sentence case) while journal titles take title case and italics.
Journal article: Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year). Title of article. Journal Name, Volume(Issue), Page-Page. https://doi.org/xx.xxxx
Book: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of book (Edition). Publisher.
Website: Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of page. Site Name. URL
Two 7th-edition changes matter most. First, the publisher location is no longer included for books. Second, the DOI is formatted as a full https link rather than the old "doi:" prefix. APA 7 also raised the author cap: list up to 20 authors in a reference, and for 21 or more, give the first 19, an ellipsis, then the final author.
The errors that recur in student and early-career work are consistent:
- Title case where sentence case is required for article and book titles.
- Missing hanging indent in the reference list.
- Ampersand misuse, using "and" inside parentheses or "&" in narrative text.
- Omitting the year in narrative citations.
- Old DOI format, carrying over the "doi:" prefix from the 6th edition.
A reference manager configured for APA 7 prevents most of these, and a final proofread against the Publication Manual catches the rest. Our roundup of the best reference managers covers tools that output clean APA 7, and our academic editing team verifies citations and reference lists for theses and journal submissions.
Choosing or recognising the right style starts with the numbered-versus-author-date distinction explained in our guide to in-text citations and the reference list. If your discipline is medicine or the biomedical sciences, you will usually need a numbered style; if it is psychology, education, or the social sciences, it will usually be APA. Submitting a psychology manuscript in Vancouver, or a clinical paper in APA, is an immediate signal to an editor that the authors did not check the instructions, which our guide to choosing a target journal helps you avoid.
For a thesis or a journal article where citation accuracy carries real weight, drafting in a reference manager and then verifying the final output against APA 7 is the reliable path. To compare the same paper in APA, Vancouver, and AMA side by side, see our guide on citing a journal article correctly. When the stakes or the volume are high, an editor who works in APA daily will catch the subtle capitalisation and punctuation errors that automated tools still miss.
DOIs, URLs, and Digital Sources in APA References
A frequent source of APA citation errors is the handling of digital locators. Current APA style presents the DOI as a full hyperlink in the format https://doi.org/10.xxxx, with no "Retrieved from" preface and no full stop after it that could be mistaken for part of the address. When a source has a DOI, always include it, even if you accessed a print copy. When an online source has no DOI, provide the direct URL, and add a retrieval date only for content expected to change over time, such as a continuously updated webpage. For an online journal article, the reference looks identical to a print one apart from the DOI. For a webpage, give the author, date, title, site name, and URL. Italicise the journal name and the volume number when you paste the reference into your word processor, since plain text cannot carry that formatting. To avoid transcription mistakes in these locators, generate the entry from the DOI directly in our citation generator, then verify it against the APA versus numbered styles distinction before you submit.