APA 7th Edition Referencing: A Complete Guide with Examples (2026)

APA 7th edition: what changed and why it matters

APA style is maintained by the American Psychological Association and is now in its 7th edition, published in 2019 and standard across universities worldwide. Unlike Harvard, APA is a single, centrally governed standard — which is good news, because it means there is one correct answer for each rule rather than a dozen institutional variants.

The 7th edition introduced several changes that still trip up students working from older guides. Three matter most. First, for works with three or more authors you now use ‘et al.’ from the very first in-text citation (the 6th edition listed up to five authors the first time). Second, the publisher location is no longer included in book references — ‘New York, NY: Routledge’ becomes simply ‘Routledge’. Third, the reference list now includes up to 20 authors in full before truncating. If your tutor is marking to APA 7, referencing to APA 6 rules will cost you marks.

As with any style, accurate APA is a marked criterion in its own right and a signal of scholarly care. The pay-off for learning it properly is that, because APA is standardised, the rules you learn transfer cleanly between modules, institutions and even journals.

When and where you’ll use APA

APA is the dominant style in psychology, education, nursing and health sciences, counselling, social work, and much of business and the social sciences — particularly in the United States, but increasingly worldwide. If you are studying psychology almost anywhere, APA 7 is your default.

You will use it for essays, lab reports, literature reviews, research proposals and dissertations. Note that APA also governs more than citations: it specifies manuscript formatting (title page, headings, tables, figures) and a preference for clear, bias-free language. This guide focuses on citations and the reference list, which is where most marks are won or lost.

How APA in-text citations work

Like Harvard, APA is author–date and supports parenthetical and narrative citations. Parenthetical: Autonomy drives motivation (Smith, 2020). Narrative: Smith (2020) found that autonomy drives motivation. A key difference from Harvard: APA uses an ampersand (&) inside brackets but ‘and’ in narrative text.

• One author: (Smith, 2020)
• Two authors: (Smith & Jones, 2020) in brackets; ‘Smith and Jones (2020)’ in narrative
• Three or more authors: (Smith et al., 2020) from the first citation
• Direct quotation: add the page — (Smith, 2020, p. 23); for sources without pages (e.g. websites) use a paragraph number (Smith, 2020, para. 4)
• Group author: (American Psychological Association [APA], 2020) first time, then (APA, 2020)
• No date: (Smith, n.d.)
• Same author, same year: (Smith, 2020a, 2020b)
• Multiple sources together: alphabetical, separated by semicolons — (Jones, 2019; Smith, 2020)
• Secondary source: (Brown, 1998, as cited in Smith, 2020)

APA strongly favours paraphrase over quotation. When you paraphrase you need author and year; a page number is optional but helpful for a specific finding.

Building your APA reference list

The list sits at the end under the heading References, centred and bold. Entries are alphabetical by the first author’s surname, double-spaced in a formal manuscript, with a hanging indent. APA capitalisation is distinctive: sentence case for the titles of articles and books (capitalise only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns), but title case for journal names. Include the DOI as a full https link where one exists. The table below shows APA 7 format with a worked example for each common source type.

A sample APA reference list

Assembled, a short APA reference list looks like this — alphabetical, hanging indent, sentence-case titles, DOIs as links:

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.).

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68

Smith, J. (2020). Organisational behaviour in practice (3rd ed.). Routledge.

APA formatting rules that lose easy marks

• Sentence case for article and book titles; title case for journal names. This is the single most common APA slip.
• Ampersand in brackets, ‘and’ in text. (Smith & Jones, 2020) but ‘Smith and Jones (2020) argued…’
• No publisher location in APA 7 — just the publisher name.
• DOIs as full links — https://doi.org/10.xxxx, with no full stop after.
• Italicise the book title, the journal name and the volume number; do not italicise the issue number or the article title.
• Hanging indent and alphabetical order, exactly as in Harvard.

The seven most common APA 7 mistakes

1. Using APA 6 author rules. APA 7 uses ‘et al.’ from the first citation for three or more authors — do not list them all first.
2. Title-casing article titles. Article and book titles take sentence case; only journal names take title case.
3. Including the publisher location. Drop ‘London:’ or ‘New York, NY:’ — APA 7 removed it.
4. Ampersand errors. ‘&’ belongs only inside brackets, never in narrative sentences.
5. Missing or mis-formatted DOIs. Use the full https://doi.org/ link, not ‘doi:’ or a bare number.
6. Forgetting paragraph numbers for quotes from web pages. No page number? Use (Author, year, para. n).
7. Reference list and citations not matching. As always, every citation needs an entry and vice versa.

Quoting, paraphrasing and summarising in APA

APA has clear expectations for how you integrate sources. Direct quotations need author, year and a page or paragraph number: Motivation reflects ‘the energisation and direction of behaviour’ (Smith, 2020, p. 12). Quotations of 40 words or more are formatted as a free-standing indented block, without quotation marks, with the citation after the final full stop. APA actively discourages over-quoting; the manual’s preference is for paraphrase.

Paraphrasing — restating a point in your own words and structure — is the APA default. You must cite the author and year; a page number is encouraged when you are pointing to a specific finding in a long work. As with any style, changing a few words while keeping the original sentence shape is patchwriting and counts as plagiarism. Summarising a whole study in a sentence, with a citation, shows the strongest command of the literature.

APA also expects ‘bias-free language’: describe people at the appropriate level of specificity, use the person’s preferred terms, and prefer ‘people-first’ or ‘identity-first’ language as the community in question prefers. This is part of the style, and some rubrics mark it.

Step by step: referencing a journal article in APA 7

The journal article is the source you will cite most, so master this pattern:

1. Author(s), surname then initials, with an ampersand before the last: Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L.
2. Year in brackets, then a full stop: (2000).
3. Article title in sentence case, no quotation marks: Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation.
4. Journal name in italics and title case, followed by the volume in italics: American Psychologist, 55
5. Issue in brackets, not italic: (1),
6. Page range, no ‘pp.’: 68–78.
7. DOI as a full link: https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68

Assembled: Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68

How APA differs from Harvard, MLA and Vancouver

APA and Harvard are both author–date and look alike, but APA drops the publisher location, omits ‘pp.’ for journal page ranges, presents DOIs as links and uses sentence case for titles — small differences that markers notice. MLA is author–page: (Smith 23), with a ‘Works Cited’ list, and is used mainly in the humanities. Vancouver, standard in medicine and nursing, uses numbered citations [1] in order of appearance rather than author and year. OSCOLA (law) uses footnotes. If a module asks you to switch, keep your disciplined citing habit and simply change the format. Our citation styles comparison lays them out side by side.

Reference faster, without the errors

The authoritative source for APA

The definitive reference is the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th edition, 2020). The APA Style website (apastyle.apa.org) publishes free, regularly updated guidance and examples, including for newer source types such as social media and AI tools. When a rule is genuinely ambiguous, the official APA Style site is the authority to trust.

Related referencing guides

• Harvard (Cite Them Right) referencing guide
• MLA 9th format & citation guide
• How to cite ChatGPT & AI tools
• Citation styles compared: Harvard vs APA vs MLA vs more

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between APA 6 and APA 7?

APA 7 (2019) uses ‘et al.’ from the first citation for three or more authors, drops the publisher location from book references, lists up to 20 authors in the reference list, and presents DOIs as full https links. Mark to APA 7 unless told otherwise.

Do I use & or ‘and’ in APA?

Use the ampersand (&) only inside parentheses — (Smith & Jones, 2020). In a narrative sentence, write ‘Smith and Jones (2020)’.

How do I cite a quote from a website with no page numbers?

Use a paragraph number instead: (Smith, 2020, para. 4). If the page has headings, you can cite the section heading and the paragraph within it.

Is the title in sentence case or title case?

Article and book titles use sentence case (capitalise only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns). Journal names use title case. This is the most common APA error.

Do I include the DOI?

Yes, whenever one exists, formatted as a full link: https://doi.org/10.xxxx with no full stop afterwards. If there is no DOI, give the URL of the article’s landing page.

How can I generate APA 7 references quickly?

Use a citation generator set to APA 7, then check capitalisation and DOIs against the rules above. Our free Citation Generator produces APA 7 in-text citations and reference-list entries for every source type in this guide.

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