How to cite in APA (7th edition): formats, examples, and common mistakes

APA 7th edition is the default citation style in psychology, education, nursing, and much of the social sciences. If your department handbook just says 'use APA', it almost always means the 7th edition, published in 2020, and your examiner will expect you to apply it consistently from your first in-text citation to the final entry in your reference list. Consistency matters more than any single rule: a reference list that is mostly right but drifts between editions reads as carelessness, and carelessness in references makes examiners look harder at everything else in the thesis.

APA has two moving parts that must agree with each other. In-text citations are short author-date markers placed inside your sentences. The reference list is the alphabetised set of full entries at the end of the document. Every in-text citation must match exactly one reference entry, and every reference entry must be cited somewhere in the text. Most APA problems in a thesis are mismatches between these two layers, not exotic formatting questions about some rare source type.

This guide covers the in-text rules, the reference formats for the four source types you will cite most (journal article, book, book chapter, and website), six worked examples you can adapt, the five mistakes markers flag most often, and how to generate APA citations automatically instead of typing them by hand.

APA in-text citations: parenthetical and narrative

APA in-text citations come in two forms, and you will use both in every chapter. A parenthetical citation puts the author and year in brackets at the end of the clause the claim sits in: (Nguyen & Adeyemi, 2024). A narrative citation names the authors in the sentence itself and brackets only the year: Nguyen and Adeyemi (2024) found that sleep restriction reduced recall accuracy. Note the switch in the connector: an ampersand inside parentheses, the word 'and' in running text. Mixing those two up is one of the fastest ways to signal rushed referencing.

Direct quotations always need a location: (Kaur, 2021, p. 84) for a single page, or pp. 84-86 for a range. For paraphrases, APA makes the page number optional, but many supervisors ask for one anyway because a page number makes the claim checkable in minutes rather than hours. If a source has no page numbers, cite a paragraph number or a section heading instead: (Torres, 2023, para. 4).

When several works support one claim, put them in a single set of brackets, in alphabetical order, separated by semicolons: (Ito, 2019; Kaur, 2021; Nguyen & Adeyemi, 2024). Do not scatter three separately bracketed citations across one sentence to support the same point; it clutters the prose and hides the fact that the sources agree.

APA et al. rules: one, two, or many authors

How you write the author part of a citation depends on how many authors the work has. APA 7 simplified these rules, which is exactly why people who learned APA 6 keep getting them wrong. The reference list has its own separate author rule: spell out every author for works with up to 20 authors, and only at 21 or more list the first 19, insert an ellipsis, and end with the final author's name. If your export tool still truncates at seven authors, it is producing APA 6. The in-text rules:

• One author: cite the surname every time: (Okafor, 2022).
• Two authors: cite both surnames every time: (Nguyen & Adeyemi, 2024). Never reduce two authors to et al.
• Three or more authors: first author plus et al. from the very first citation: (Silva et al., 2023).
• Group authors with a familiar abbreviation: introduce it once, (World Health Organization [WHO], 2024), then cite (WHO, 2024) from that point on.
• Same author, same year: distinguish the works with letters assigned by reference-list order: (Okafor, 2022a, 2022b).

APA reference format for a journal article

The journal article template is: Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Year). Title of article in sentence case. Journal Title in Italics, Volume(Issue), page range. https://doi.org/xxxxx. Three details do most of the work here. The article title takes sentence case: capitalise only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns. The journal title and the volume number are italicised; the issue number and the page range are not. And the DOI is written as a full https://doi.org link whenever one exists, with no full stop after it.

Worked example 1, a standard article with a DOI: Nguyen, L., & Adeyemi, F. (2024). Sleep quality and working memory in first-year graduate students. Journal of Applied Cognition, 18(2), 214-231. https://doi.org/10.1000/jac.2024.0214

Worked example 2, three authors: Silva, R., Tanaka, H., & Osei, K. (2023). Attrition in longitudinal cohort studies: A simulation comparison of retention strategies. Methods in Social Research, 41(4), 502-519. https://doi.org/10.1000/msr.2023.0502. In your text, this source appears as (Silva et al., 2023) from its first citation onwards, while the reference entry names all three authors.

How to cite a book or book chapter in APA 7

The book template is: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of book in sentence case and italics (2nd ed.). Publisher. APA 7 dropped the place of publication entirely, so 'London:' or 'Thousand Oaks, CA:' before the publisher name is now an error rather than an optional extra. Edition information sits in parentheses after the title, outside the italics.

Worked example 3: Kaur, A. (2021). Mixed methods for the social sciences (2nd ed.). Sage.

The chapter template is: Chapter Author, A. A. (Year). Title of chapter in sentence case. In E. E. Editor & F. F. Editor (Eds.), Title of book in italics (pp. 133-152). Publisher. Notice the inversion: chapter authors appear as Surname, Initials, but editors appear as Initials Surname. In your text you cite the chapter authors and the year, never the editors of the collection, and the page range in the entry covers the whole chapter, not the pages you happened to quote.

Worked example 4: Ito, M. (2019). Coding qualitative interview data. In P. Álvarez & R. Chen (Eds.), Handbook of graduate research methods (pp. 133-152). Routledge.

How to cite a website in APA 7

The webpage template is: Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of page in italics. Site Name. URL. If the author and the site are the same organisation, drop the site name so it is not stated twice. Use (n.d.) in place of the year when no date is published, and add a retrieval date only when the page is designed to change over time and no archived version exists. For anything scholarly, prefer the published article over the web page describing it.

Worked example 5, a page with a personal author: Torres, J. (2023, May 4). How to preregister your dissertation study. Open Research Notes. https://www.example.org/preregistration

Worked example 6, an organisational author on its own site: World Health Organization. (2024, June 26). Physical activity. https://www.example.org/physical-activity. In text, introduce the abbreviation on first use, (World Health Organization [WHO], 2024), then cite (WHO, 2024).

Formatting the APA reference list itself

The entries are only half the job; the list has mechanics of its own. Order entries alphabetically by the first author's surname, letter by letter. Multiple works by the same first author are ordered by year, earliest first, and same-year works receive the a, b, c suffixes that your in-text citations then reuse. Apply a hanging indent to every entry: first line flush left, subsequent lines indented. Do not number the list, do not bullet it, and do not split it by source type.

Check your university's thesis formatting requirements before you obsess over the manual's defaults. Line spacing, font, and heading conventions usually come from your institution's template, and the institution wins wherever the two disagree. The APA manual itself defers to local requirements for theses and dissertations.

The five most common APA mistakes examiners catch

These are the errors that appear again and again in thesis reference lists, and a marker will usually spot each of them within a single page. Beneath all five sits the structural error that matters most: in-text citations with no matching reference entry, and reference entries never cited in the text. Examiners treat that mismatch as a proxy for how carefully the whole thesis was assembled, so fix it before you polish any punctuation.

• Title Case in article titles. Reference-list titles for articles, books, and chapters take sentence case. Capitalising Every Significant Word usually means the title was pasted from a publisher page and never edited.
• Italics on the wrong element. Italicise the journal title and the volume number, not the article title and not the issue number. Reversing them is instantly visible to anyone who marks for a living.
• APA 6 et al. habits. Spelling out three or more authors on first citation is the old rule. In APA 7, those works are et al. from the very first citation.
• Publisher locations left in. 'New York, NY: Routledge' is APA 6. APA 7 wants the publisher name alone.
• Ampersand and 'and' swapped. The ampersand belongs inside parentheses and in the reference list; the word 'and' belongs in narrative citations. '(Nguyen and Adeyemi, 2024)' and 'Nguyen & Adeyemi (2024) argue' are both wrong.

What changed from APA 6 to APA 7

If your templates, notes, or your supervisor's model answers predate 2020, audit them against the current edition before you inherit someone else's outdated habits. The headline changes:

• Publisher locations removed from all reference entries.
• Et al. from the first citation for works with three or more authors.
• Up to 20 authors spelled out in a reference entry, up from seven.
• DOIs written as https://doi.org links rather than 'doi:' prefixes.
• 'Retrieved from' dropped before most URLs; retrieval dates reserved for changing, unarchived pages.

A perfectly formatted APA citation can still be wrong

Formatting is the visible layer of referencing. The failures that actually endanger a thesis sit underneath it: a real reference attached to a claim the paper never makes, a citation pasted from an AI chat that points to a paper that does not exist, or a source that was retracted after you read it. No style manual protects you from any of those, and no formatting tool will notice them either.

That is why CiteDash treats citations as database objects that resolve to real papers rather than as free text. Its Fact Checker verifies AI-drafted claims against the full-text PDFs it holds before the draft reaches you, and retracted papers carry a visible badge and are blocked from citation. If AI touches your drafting process anywhere, that verification layer matters more than any punctuation rule in this guide.

Generate APA citations automatically

Hand-typing references is where most of the errors above come from, and none of it is intellectually valuable work. For a one-off citation, the free APA citation generator formats the entry from the details you give it, and the free DOI lookup pulls a paper's details from its DOI so you are not retyping author lists from a publisher page.

For a full thesis, generate rather than transcribe. The Reference Manager builds the bibliography from the papers in your project library, in APA 7th or any of 11 other styles, and switching styles reformats every entry at once. Because each citation is a database object tied to a real paper, the mismatch class of error disappears: nothing can appear in your text without existing in your list. For the day-to-day workflow, see Manage your bibliography: APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE.