APA Citation Generator (7th Edition)

About the APA Citation Generator (7th Edition)

Build APA Style (7th edition) references and in-text citations for journal articles, books, edited book chapters, web pages, newspaper, magazine and blog articles, reports, theses and dissertations, YouTube videos and films, data sets and software. Paste a DOI, an ISBN or a web address to fill in the form for you, or type the details yourself — the reference updates as you type and pastes into Word or Google Docs with its italics.

The formatting follows the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.) as shown in APA’s own reference examples: surnames and initials for up to 20 authors (from 21, the first 19, an ellipsis and the last), sentence-case titles, italic journal names and volume numbers, en-dash page ranges, and DOIs written as https://doi.org/ links. Every entry comes with its parenthetical and narrative in-text citation, and the checks under the result point out anything missing or mistyped.

Common uses

• Reference lists for psychology, education, nursing, business and social-science assignments and theses that require APA 7.
• Turning a DOI from a database or a PDF’s first page into a finished reference in seconds.
• Checking a reference you wrote by hand: the checks list missing volume numbers, invalid DOIs and impossible dates.
• Collecting every source for an assignment in one alphabetised reference list, ready to paste into Word or Google Docs.

The APA 7 rules this generator applies

• Authors: surname, comma, initials with a space between them; “&” before the last author. Up to 20 authors are listed; from 21, the first 19, then “. . .” and the final author.
• Group authors (organisations) are written in full. When the group is also the publisher, the publisher is left out.
• No author: the title moves to the author position. No date: (n.d.).
• Dates: the year for journals, books and theses; year, month and day for news, web pages, videos and reports.
• Titles: sentence case; italic for works that stand alone (books, reports, web pages, videos, data sets, software). Periodical names keep title case and are italic, as is the volume number.
• Links: DOIs as https://doi.org/… with no full stop after; URLs for web sources. “Retrieved Month Day, Year, from” only for pages designed to change.
• Descriptions in brackets: [Video], [Film], [Data set], [Computer software], [Doctoral dissertation, University].
• In-text citations: (Author, year) and Author (year); “&” inside brackets but “and” in the sentence; three or more authors as first author et al.; p. or pp. for pages and para. for paragraphs.

Sources: APA Style handouts Common Reference Examples, Reference Guide for Journal Articles, Books, and Edited Book Chapters and the In-Text Citation Checklist.

Where autofill gets its details

• DOI: your browser asks doi.org for the record in CSL-JSON, a standard citation format. doi.org forwards the request to the agency that registered the DOI — Crossref for most journals and books, DataCite for many data sets, software releases and repository items such as arXiv preprints, or mEDRA and the EU Publications Office for some European publishers.
• ISBN: the check digit is verified first, then your browser asks Open Library, a free catalogue edited by volunteers. Its records can be incomplete or wrong, so compare them with the title page and copyright page.
• Web address: MySmartCoPilot’s server reads the page’s citation tags (the Highwire Press tags Google Scholar uses), schema.org data, Dublin Core and Open Graph tags, and sends back only those details. Links to publisher pages that contain a DOI, and arXiv links, are looked up by DOI instead.

Your reference list

Press Add to list to collect sources. The list is sorted the APA way — alphabetically by the first word of each entry, letter by letter, ignoring “A”, “An” and “The” — and works by the same authors (in the same order) from the same year get a, b, c after the year, in title order; each such entry shows its in-text citation, for example (Ray, 2004a). Works by different authors that shorten to the same “et al.” citation do not get letters: the list points them out, because APA tells them apart by naming more authors, as in (Smith, Jones, et al., 2020). Copy list pastes it with italics and hanging indents; Word (.rtf) downloads a double-spaced file with the References heading. The list is not uploaded anywhere; it lasts until you reload or leave the page, so copy or download it before you go.

Limitations

• Autofill copies what publishers and catalogues have recorded, which can be incomplete or wrong. Names given in one piece are split into family and given names automatically, so check compound surnames such as García Márquez or López de Prado. Always check the result against the work itself.
• Sentence case cannot recognise every proper noun: after converting a title, re-capitalise names of people, places, organisations and similar terms.
• The generator covers the common reference types. Rarer ones in the Publication Manual — legal materials, social-media posts, conference sessions, TV episodes, podcasts, translated or reprinted articles — need adjusting by hand.
• Some DOI registration agencies, such as Japan Link Center, do not allow lookups from a web page; enter those records yourself.
• Many news and shopping sites block automated requests, so web-address autofill may find nothing on them.
• Web-address autofill files newspaper, magazine and blog articles under “News, magazine or blog”. APA cites articles on news websites (such as BBC News, CNN, Reuters or Vox) as web pages instead, so switch the type for those.

Privacy

Everything you type stays in your browser except the autofill box: a DOI goes to doi.org (and the agency it forwards to), an ISBN to Open Library, and a web address to MySmartCoPilot’s server, which reads that page and returns only its citation details — neither the page nor the web address is stored. Your reference list is kept only in this page, never uploaded, and is gone when you reload or leave it.