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APA 7TH EDITION

The complete APA reference.

Every source type, every edge case, every rule that actually appears in real student papers — written for the way APA gets used, not the way the manual describes it in the abstract.

In this guide
  1. APA fundamentals: in-text and reference list
  2. In-text citations: every variation
  3. Journal articles (the dominant source type)
  4. Books and edited volumes
  5. Chapters in edited books
  6. Web sources, blogs, and online articles
  7. Government reports and institutional documents
  8. Datasets, software, and code
  9. Videos, podcasts, and social media
  10. Edge cases that trip everyone up
  11. Formatting the reference list page
  12. Verifying your citations before submission

The American Psychological Association style is the most widely used citation system in the English-speaking academic world. It dominates psychology, education, social work, nursing, and most empirical research in the social sciences.

This guide covers APA 7th edition (October 2019, still current in 2026). APA 6 is officially deprecated; the most important difference is that APA 7 simplified the in-text citation rules for three or more authors.

APA fundamentals: in-text and reference list

APA citation has two parts: a brief in-text citation embedded in your prose, and a complete reference list entry at the end of your paper. They work together — the in-text citation tells the reader which source you're drawing on, the reference list tells them how to find it.

The in-text citation is parenthetical and minimal: (Author, Year) or (Author, Year, p. X) for direct quotes. The reference list entry is detailed: complete author list, full title, publication venue, and a DOI or URL for verification.

Every in-text citation must have a corresponding reference list entry. Phantom entries — references in the bibliography that never appear in your prose — are a flag for academic integrity reviewers.

In-text citations: every variation

The base form has the author's surname and the year of publication, separated by a comma, in parentheses at the end of the sentence:

BASE FORM
Recent research has documented systematic bias in AI detection tools (Liang, 2023).

If you mention the author's name in the running text, only the year goes in parentheses immediately after the name:

AUTHOR IN TEXT
Liang (2023) demonstrated that AI detectors misclassify essays by non-native English speakers at rates exceeding sixty percent.

Two authors

TWO AUTHORS — PARENTHETICAL
The bias appears across multiple detector architectures (Liang & Zou, 2023).

Three or more authors (APA 7)

Use the first author's surname followed by "et al." from the very first citation onward.

THREE+ AUTHORS
Detection bias persists even when prompts are explicitly engineered to mimic non-native style (Liang et al., 2023).

Direct quotations

DIRECT QUOTE — SHORT
As Liang et al. (2023) argued, the underlying mechanism is "structural to perplexity-based detection" (p. 100779).

Journal articles (the dominant source type)

FORMAT
Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Year). Title of article. Journal Name, Volume(Issue), Page–Page. https://doi.org/xxxxx
REAL EXAMPLE
Liang, W., Yuksekgonul, M., Mao, Y., Wu, E., & Zou, J. (2023). GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers. Patterns, 4(7), 100779. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2023.100779

Article title: sentence case. Journal name: title case, italicized. Volume italicized; issue in parentheses, not italicized. DOI as https://doi.org/... hyperlink.

Books and edited volumes

FORMAT
Author, A. A. (Year). Title of book. Publisher.
REAL EXAMPLE
Bryman, A. (2016). Social research methods (5th ed.). Oxford University Press.

Book title italicized, sentence case. Edition in parentheses after title. Publisher city is not required in APA 7.

Chapters in edited books

FORMAT
Chapter Author, A. A. (Year). Title of chapter. In E. E. Editor (Ed.), Title of book (pp. xx–xx). Publisher.

In-text: cite the chapter author and year — not the editor.

Web sources, blogs, and online articles

FORMAT
Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of article. Site Name. URL

Use full dates for time-sensitive online sources. Site name italicized. URL at the end without a trailing period after the URL.

Government reports and institutional documents

Include report numbers when present (NCES, GAO, etc.). List the issuing agency as author when appropriate.

Datasets, software, and code

Use bracketed descriptors: [Data set], [Computer software], [Source code]. Include version numbers for software when relevant.

Videos, podcasts, and social media

YouTube: include [Video] and channel/uploader as author when appropriate. Podcasts: host, episode title, program name, URL.

Edge cases that trip everyone up

Secondary citations

Avoid when possible — find the original. If unavoidable, cite the source you read and name the original in-text as (as cited in …).

Personal communications

Emails and interviews you conducted are not retrievable — in-text only, not in the reference list.

Formatting the reference list page

Title: "References" — centered, bold (APA 7). Hanging indent half an inch; double-spacing; alphabetical by first author surname; DOIs as clickable https://doi.org/ links.

Verifying your citations before submission

Before you submit, verify that every citation points to a real, locatable source. With LLMs, plausible-looking citations may be fabricated.

  1. Search the DOI on doi.org.
  2. Search the title on Google Scholar.
  3. Check the journal archive.
  4. Use CrossRef search.
Tools designed for academic work avoid this problem. Papyra's Document Correction The AI & Citations spoke covers verification in depth.
Tool, not guide

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