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APA 7th edition (2020)

Free APA citation generator, 7th edition

Paste a URL, DOI, ISBN or title and get a correct APA 7th edition citation in a couple of seconds. No account, no daily cap, no paywall halfway through your reference list.

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Here is how it works
1
Pick your source type
Choose from the left. Website, book, journal, YouTube. It changes what we look for and how we format it.
2
Paste and cite
Drop in a URL, ISBN, DOI or title. Hit Cite. We check academic databases first, then AI fills in the rest.
3
Switch styles freely
APA, MLA, Chicago and more. Switch any time and your citation regenerates automatically in the new format.

When you use APA 7th edition

APA is the style of the American Psychological Association, and the 7th edition from 2020 is what nearly every psychology, education, nursing, business and social science course asks for today. If your assignment brief just says APA without a number, it almost certainly means the 7th edition.

The style runs on an author and date system. Every source gets a reference list entry with four blocks in a fixed order: who wrote it, when, what it is called, and where it came from. Once you see those four blocks, most of the formatting rules start to make sense instead of feeling random.

The tool above already knows the rules. It pulls real metadata from Crossref for DOIs and Open Library for ISBNs, so journal articles and books come out clean. For ordinary web pages it reads the page metadata, which is usually right but always worth a quick check against the page itself.

The formats, with real examples

Paste your source into the tool above and it fills these in for you. If you would rather see the pattern, here is exactly what each one looks like.

Website or web page
Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of page. Site Name. URL
EXAMPLESmith, J. (2023, March 14). How climate change affects oceans. National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/oceans
Book
Author, A. A. (Year). Title of work: Capital letter also for subtitle. Publisher.
EXAMPLEBrown, C. (2021). The history of everything: A short introduction. Oxford University Press.
Journal article
Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Year). Title of article. Journal Name, Volume(Issue), pages. https://doi.org/xxxx
EXAMPLEKucsko, G., & Maurer, P. C. (2013). Nanometre-scale thermometry in a living cell. Nature, 500(7460), 54-58. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12373
Page with no author
Organization Name. (Year, Month Day). Title of page. URL
EXAMPLECenters for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023, January 10). Flu symptoms. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/

In-text citations

Parenthetical: (Smith, 2023) for a paraphrase, (Smith, 2023, p. 15) when you quote directly.
Narrative: Smith (2023) found that ocean temperatures rose faster than models predicted.

Two authors: (Smith & Lee, 2023). Three or more authors: (Smith et al., 2023) from the very first citation. No author: use the first words of the title in quotation marks, like ("Flu Symptoms," 2023).

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Mistakes people make in APA 7th edition

COMMON SLIP
Writing article and page titles in Title Case, with every word capitalized.
WHAT TO DO
APA uses sentence case for article, chapter and page titles. Only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns get a capital letter. Journal names keep Title Case.
COMMON SLIP
Adding "Retrieved from" before every URL because an older guide said so.
WHAT TO DO
APA 7 dropped it. You only add a retrieval date, like Retrieved March 14, 2026, from URL, when the page is designed to change over time, such as a Wikipedia entry or a social feed.
COMMON SLIP
Including the publisher city, like New York, NY, in book references.
WHAT TO DO
That was APA 6. The 7th edition removed publisher locations entirely. It is just the publisher name now.
COMMON SLIP
Using et al. only after the third citation of a source with many authors.
WHAT TO DO
In APA 7, any source with three or more authors is shortened to First Author et al. from the first in-text citation onward. The reference list is where the full author list lives, up to 20 names.

Questions students actually ask

How do I cite a website in APA 7th edition?
The pattern is Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of page. Site Name. URL. If no individual person is credited, the organization takes the author position, and when the organization and the site name are the same you drop the site name to avoid repeating it. If there is no date anywhere on the page, write (n.d.) where the year goes.
What changed between APA 6 and APA 7?
The big ones: publisher locations are gone from book references, DOIs are formatted as https://doi.org links, up to 20 authors are listed before an ellipsis, et al. starts at three authors instead of six, retrieval dates are only for content that changes, and student papers no longer need a running head.
Do I need a page number in an APA in-text citation?
Only for direct quotes, where it is required, like (Smith, 2023, p. 15). For paraphrases APA encourages a page or paragraph number when it would help the reader find the passage, but it is not mandatory.
How do I cite a source with no author and no date?
Move the title into the author position and use (n.d.) for the date. In text, cite the first few words of the title in quotation marks with n.d., like ("Flu Symptoms," n.d.). Also consider whether a source with no author and no date is strong enough to cite at all.
Is this APA generator really free?
Yes. Every style on this site is free with no daily limit and no account. The site is funded by light ads instead of a subscription, which is the whole reason it exists.

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