Free Online Citation Generator (APA) Tool

1. Choose the source type: website, book, journal article or news article.
2. Fill in the author(s) as 'Last, First', the title, the year and the source-specific fields shown.
3. Read the formatted APA reference, with italics rendered, in the result panel.
4. Copy the reference and the in-text citation separately using the copy links.

APA style is the citation system of the American Psychological Association, used across psychology, education, nursing and the social sciences. The current version is the 7th edition, published in 2019. Its defining features are author-date in-text citations such as (Smith, 2020) and a reference list ordered alphabetically by author surname, with the publication year in parentheses immediately after the author.

APA 7 prescribes different element orders for different source types. A journal article lists author, year, article title, italicised journal name, volume, issue, page range and DOI. A book lists author, year, italicised title and publisher. A web page lists author, year, italicised title, site name and URL, with a retrieval date only for pages designed to change. This tool exposes exactly the fields each type needs and assembles them in the right order with correct punctuation and italics.

The 7th edition made several practical changes from the 6th: it drops the publisher location for books, uses 'et al.' for three or more authors in every in-text citation, and formats DOIs as full https links. Always check the generated entry against your assignment brief or the Publication Manual, since edge cases — group authors, editions, translated works — can need manual tweaks. Everything is formatted in your browser.