APA 7 Citation & Reference Builder
Enter one source at a time to get its APA reference, parenthetical citation and narrative citation. Review warnings, add sources to a temporary collection, and understand each formatting decision.
Your reference
Fill in the form, or load the example, to see the reference and in-text citations.
Current references
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What should I do next?
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Reference Checker
Checks reference lists and citations in APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago, IEEE and Harvard for structure, missing details, duplicates, order and mismatched citations.
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Literature Matrix Builder
Organise, compare and synthesise the studies in your literature review, and see the repeated methods, variables and gaps across them.
APA 7 Citations and References
Learn how APA 7 connects source metadata, in-text citations and reference-list entries, then build trustworthy outputs without inventing missing information.
How references are formatted
- Authors are listed by family name and initials, in the order they appear on the source, with an ampersand (&) before the last. Up to 20 authors are all listed; from 21, the first 19, an ellipsis, then the last.
- The date follows the authors in brackets. Books and articles use the year; web pages use as much of the date as the page shows. Without a date, APA uses “n.d.”.
- Titles of books and web pages are in italics; titles of articles are not. For an article, the journal name and volume are in italics.
- A DOI is written as a link beginning https://doi.org/, with no full stop after it. Without a DOI, a web address is used if there is one.
- When the publisher or site name is the same as the author, it is left out.
- In text, one or two authors are named each time; three or more are shortened to the first author and “et al.”.
What the generator can't check
- Capitalisation. Titles are used exactly as you type them, because sentence case depends on proper nouns that only you can judge.
- Your instructions. An instructor or publisher may require changes to standard APA; their instructions come first.
- Other kinds of source. Book chapters, reports, videos and other formats aren't supported yet.
- Whether the details are right. The generator formats what you enter; check names, dates and numbers against the source.
Privacy
Your reference is generated entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to ResearchKit or anyone else, or stored.