APA Referencing Generator
Use this free generator to build an APA (7th edition) reference in seconds. Pick your source type, fill in the details, and copy the full reference-list entry plus the in-text citation. For the rules behind it, read our APA referencing guide — it explains author rules, DOIs, hanging indents and the mistakes that cost marks.
How APA referencing works
APA style — set by the American Psychological Association and now in its 7th edition — is the standard for psychology and is also common in nursing, education and the social sciences. In the text you cite with the author–date system: (Smith, 2023). At the end, your reference list gives the full details of every source, alphabetically by author surname, with a hanging indent on each entry. This generator follows APA 7 for the four source types students use most.
Quick rules worth remembering
- Three or more authors: from the very first citation, write the first surname + et al. — (Johnson et al., 2023). In the reference list, authors are listed in full (up to 20).
- Two authors: use & inside brackets — (Smith & Jones, 2023) — but "and" in your sentence: Smith and Jones (2023) found that…
- Sentence case: in reference-list titles of articles and books, capitalise only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns. Journal titles keep their capitals.
- DOIs: present them as working links (https://doi.org/…) with no full stop afterwards, and no "Retrieved from".
- Quotes: add the page number: (Smith, 2023, p. 45). For online sources without pages, use the paragraph number.
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The APA 7 rules this generator is built on
Every entry this tool produces follows the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition — the current standard for psychology and a common requirement across nursing, education, business and the social sciences. The construction order is fixed by the manual: author surnames with initials first, the date in brackets, then the title, then the source. What changes between source types is the styling of that title. Book and article titles use sentence case — only the first word, the first word after a colon and proper nouns are capitalised — while journal names keep their full title case and are italicised together with the volume number. The issue number, where one exists, sits in brackets immediately after the volume and is not italicised.
The detail students lose most marks on is the identifier at the end. Under APA 7 a DOI is presented as a live link — https://doi.org/ followed by the number — with no full stop after it and no "Retrieved from" wording in front of it, because the link itself is the retrieval information. The generator formats DOIs exactly that way, whether you paste the bare number or the full link. Author handling follows the manual too: two authors are joined with an ampersand inside brackets but the word "and" in a narrative citation, and three or more authors shorten to the first surname plus et al. in the text from the very first citation, while the reference list writes authors out in full.
Please double-check before you submit
No generator can see your university's marking rubric, so treat each entry as an accurate first draft to check, not a finished guarantee. Some departments follow APA 7 to the letter; others keep one or two habits from the 6th edition or add a local rule of their own. Spend two minutes comparing a generated journal entry with the example in your course handbook, and fix any recurring difference across your whole list. One more thing the tool cannot do for you: APA reference lists are formatted with a hanging indent, where the first line of each entry sits flush left and the following lines are indented. Apply that indent when you paste the entry into Word or Google Docs — it is the first visual cue markers look for.
Frequently asked questions
Is this APA 6 or APA 7?
APA 7, the current edition. The clearest differences you will see in the output are DOIs shown as https://doi.org links, no publisher location for books, and no "Retrieved from" before URLs — all three are 7th-edition rules that many older websites still get wrong.
How many authors do I write out in the reference list?
APA 7 asks for up to 20 authors in full in the reference list, in the order they appear on the source. It is only the in-text citation that shortens: three or more authors become the first surname plus et al. straight away, every time you cite them.
What goes in italics in an APA reference?
The book title, and the journal title together with its volume number. Article and chapter titles are never italicised, and they use sentence case even when the original article heading was written in capitals.
My source is a webpage with no author. What do I enter?
Use the organisation responsible for the site — a university, a charity, a government department — as the author. If there is no organisation either, APA starts the entry with the page title instead, and the in-text citation uses a shortened version of that title in quotation marks.
Does APA use page numbers for paraphrases?
Page numbers are required for direct quotations and encouraged, but not compulsory, for paraphrases. Adding one for a specific finding or statistic is good practice and helps your marker find the passage you are relying on.
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