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Key takeaways
APA style, published by the American Psychological Association, is used across psychology, education, nursing, business and many of the social sciences. The 7th edition of its Publication Manual appeared in 2019 and is the version most instructors now expect. It uses an author–date system: brief citations in the text tell the reader whose work you are using and when it was published, and the reference list at the end gives the full details needed to find it.
Two rules hold the system together. Every source cited in the text must appear in the reference list, and every entry in the reference list must be cited in the text. The main exception is personal communications — emails, private conversations, interviews you conducted that a reader cannot retrieve — which are cited in the text only, for example (J. Rivera, personal communication, March 3, 2024).
An in-text citation can be parenthetical, with the author and year in brackets at the end of a clause, or narrative, with the author's name as part of your sentence and the year in brackets right after it. Both are correct, and mixing them keeps your prose from sounding mechanical.
Use an ampersand (&) between two authors inside parentheses and the word “and” in a narrative citation. Order several works in one parenthesis alphabetically, separated by semicolons. If you cite two works by the same author from the same year, add lowercase letters after the year — (Lopez, 2020a, 2020b) — and use the same letters in the reference list.
| Situation | Parenthetical | Narrative |
|---|---|---|
| One author | (Miller, 1956) | Miller (1956) |
| Two authors | (Watson & Crick, 1953) | Watson and Crick (1953) |
| Three or more authors | (Nguyen et al., 2021) | Nguyen et al. (2021) |
| Group author, first citation | (American Psychological Association [APA], 2020) | American Psychological Association (APA, 2020) |
| Group author, later citations | (APA, 2020) | APA (2020) |
| No date | (Lopez, n.d.) | Lopez (n.d.) |
| Two works at once | (Kahneman, 2011; Miller, 1956) | Kahneman (2011) and Miller (1956) |
When you quote directly, add a page number: (Kahneman, 2011, p. 20) for one page or (Kahneman, 2011, pp. 20–21) for a range. In a narrative citation, the page goes after the quotation, before the final punctuation. For sources without page numbers, such as webpages, use another locator: a paragraph number (para. 4), a section heading, or both (Discussion section, para. 2).
Quotations of 40 words or more go in a block quotation: start it on a new line, indent the whole block 0.5 inch, drop the quotation marks, and put the citation after the final punctuation. Shorter quotations stay in your sentence inside double quotation marks.
Paraphrases do not require a page number in APA, but the manual encourages one when it would help a reader find the passage, as in a long book. Citing every borrowed idea, not only quoted words, is the core of the guide on how to avoid plagiarism.
The reference list starts on a new page at the end of the paper. Set it up in this order:
Italics cannot be shown in the examples below, so each note says what to italicize. For more source types, see the guides to citing a book and citing a website in APA, MLA and Chicago.
Format: Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Year). Title of article. Journal Name, volume(issue), page–page. https://doi.org/xxxx
Example: Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043158 — italicize Psychological Review and the volume number 63, not the issue number.
Format: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of book (edition if not the first). Publisher.
Example: Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. — italicize the title. A later edition adds, for example, (2nd ed.) after the title, before the period.
Format: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of chapter. In E. E. Editor (Ed.), Title of book (pp. xx–xx). Publisher. Use (Eds.) for two or more editors, and italicize only the book title.
Format: Author or Group. (Year, Month Day). Title of page. Site Name. URL — italicize the page title. If the author and the site name are the same, omit the site name. Use (n.d.) when there is no date, and add a retrieval date only for pages designed to change over time.
Add the translator after the title, as (T. Translator, Trans.), and end the entry with (Original work published Year). In the text, give both years, original first: (Author, 1923/2004).
A few situations come up in almost every paper and trip people up because the basic pattern does not quite fit.
Citation errors usually start before the reference list: a quotation copied without its page number, or a paraphrase whose source you can no longer find. In Cavua's Work space you can upload the PDFs and Word files you are citing and ask about them directly, with answers that point to the page — so when you need the locator for a quotation, you can confirm both the wording and the page before it goes into your draft.
You can research across several sources at once to check who said what before you attribute it, and export a session to keep your notes alongside their page references. The formatting itself is still yours to get right. For the other two major styles, see the MLA citation guide and the guide to Chicago style citation.
Most lost marks on referencing come from a short list of errors, several of them habits carried over from the 6th edition:
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Use “et al.” for any work with three or more authors, from the very first in-text citation: (Nguyen et al., 2021) or Nguyen et al. (2021). This is a change from the 6th edition. In the reference list, by contrast, write out every author's name up to 20; only for 21 or more do you list the first 19, an ellipsis and the final author.
Page numbers are required for direct quotations, written as p. for one page or pp. for a range. For paraphrases they are optional but encouraged when they would help a reader find the passage, such as in a long book. If a source has no page numbers, use a paragraph number, a section heading or another clear locator instead.
No. The 7th edition removed the publisher's city and state or country from book references, so you write only the publisher's name, for example Farrar, Straus and Giroux. If the author and the publisher are the same organization, omit the publisher entirely so that the name is not repeated in the entry.
Use n.d., meaning “no date,” in place of the year: (Lopez, n.d.) in the text and (n.d.) in the reference entry. For webpages and other content designed to change over time, also add a retrieval date to the reference, in the form Retrieved Month Day, Year, from followed by the URL.
In APA style, a reference list contains only the works you actually cite in the paper, and it is titled References. A bibliography, used in some other styles, can also include background reading that was never cited. Unless your instructor asks for something different, an APA paper has a reference list rather than a bibliography.
Give the author or organization, the date in parentheses, the page title in italics, the site name and the URL: Author. (Year, Month Day). Title of page. Site Name. URL. If the author and the site name are the same, drop the site name. In the text, cite the author and year as usual, with n.d. if there is no date.
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