This free APA citation generator builds references in APA 7th edition, the style required by most psychology, education and social science courses. Paste a DOI, ISBN, URL or the title of a paper and the generator looks the source up in CrossRef and OpenAlex, then formats the record it finds. Nothing is invented: if a source cannot be matched to a real database record, you are told so rather than handed a plausible-looking reference.
Real American Psychological Association (APA) 7th edition references, formatted the way psychology, education and the social sciences coursework expects them.
Journal article
Smith, J. A., & Jones, B. C. (2024). Working memory under time pressure. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 36(2), 118–134. https://doi.org/10.1000/example
Book
Alvarez, M. (2023). Learning in noisy classrooms (2nd ed.). Rowan Press.
Chapter in an edited book
Okafor, N. (2022). Attention and fatigue. In L. Berg (Ed.), Handbook of applied cognition (pp. 55–78). Meridian.
APA uses an author-date system. The in-text citation carries the author surname and the year of publication, and a page number when you quote directly. The reference list at the end is alphabetised by author surname and uses a hanging indent.
(Smith & Jones, 2024, p. 42)
Citing a website in APA is the case students get wrong most often. APA 7 wants the author (which may be an organisation), the full date, the page title in sentence case and italics, the name of the site, and the URL. If no date is given, use (n.d.). A retrieval date is only added when the page is expected to change, such as a wiki or a live statistics dashboard.
World Health Organization. (2024, March 11). Air quality and health. https://www.who.int/example
The pattern each source type follows, as a quick reference. Fields in the generator are filled from the database record, but these are what the finished entries should look like.
Journal article
Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Year). Title of article. Journal Name, Volume(Issue), pages. https://doi.org/xxxx
Book
Author, A. A. (Year). Title of work (2nd ed.). Publisher.
Chapter
Author, A. A. (Year). Chapter title. In B. Editor (Ed.), Book title (pp. 1-20). Publisher.
Web page
Organisation. (Year, Month Day). Page title. https://example.com
Thesis
Author, A. A. (Year). Title [Doctoral dissertation, University]. Repository Name.
Report
Organisation. (Year). Title of report (Report No. 123). Publisher.
APA is the house style of the American Psychological Association and is required across psychology, education, counselling, nursing, social work, communication and much of the wider social sciences. In practice it reaches further than its name suggests: many business schools and health faculties adopt it, and a large share of undergraduate coursework in North America defaults to it regardless of discipline. If your handbook simply says use APA without naming an edition, it means the seventh, which has been current since 2019.
The rules for the list as a whole are separate from the rules for each entry, and marks are lost on the list far more often than on the individual references.
APA and MLA are the two styles most students meet, and mixing them is the error markers spot first. The differences are systematic rather than cosmetic.
| In-text citation | (Smith & Jones, 2024, p. 42) | (Smith and Jones 42) |
|---|---|---|
| List heading | References | Works Cited |
| Title capitalisation | Sentence case | Title Case |
| Author cut-off | Up to 20 listed in full | Three or more become et al. |
| Page ranges | 118-134, given in full | 118-34, abbreviated |
Yes. There is no paywall, no credit system, no export limit and no account. You can generate as many APA references as you need and copy them out immediately.
Yes, output follows APA 7th edition, which has been the current version since 2019. If your department still requires APA 6, check the publisher and author formatting carefully, because the two editions differ in several places.
Yes. You can paste a URL, an ISBN or a title. Books are matched through OpenLibrary and Google Books, which cover material CrossRef does not.
APA treats a chatbot response as software output: give the company as author, the year, the model name and version, and the URL. Because the conversation is not retrievable by your reader, most instructors also want the prompt and reply reproduced in an appendix.
It tells you rather than guessing. Grey literature, book chapters and non-English journals are frequently missing from open databases; in that case enter the details manually and the formatting is still applied for you.
APA calls this a secondary source and asks you to avoid it where you can, because you are relying on someone else's reading. When the original is genuinely unavailable, cite the source you actually read and signal the chain in text: (Smith, 1985, as cited in Jones, 2024). Only the source you read goes in the reference list.
The publisher location was dropped, up to 20 authors are now listed in full instead of six, Retrieved from before URLs was removed, DOIs became full https://doi.org/ links, and running heads are no longer required on student papers. Most leftover errors in submitted work trace back to one of these five.
The format changes with the kind of source. These walk through the cases students hit most.
AMA
medicine
Smith et al reported similar findings.¹
IEEE
electrical engineering and computer science
as shown in [1], [3]–[5]
ACS
chemistry
as previously reported¹
Turabian
undergraduate humanities writing
1. Jane Smith, Rivers and Empire (Boston: Meridian, 2024), 42.
Vancouver
biomedicine
previous studies (1,2) have shown