Free APA Citation Generator
APA (American Psychological Association) style is most commonly used in the social sciences. Our generator follows the 7th edition guidelines published by APA.
About APA (7th Edition)
APA (American Psychological Association) style is most commonly used in the social sciences. Our generator follows the 7th edition guidelines published by APA.
Example APA citation format
Once you paste a DOI above, you'll see an example formatted in APA style. The same data can be rendered in APA, MLA, Chicago or Harvard with a single click.
When to use this style — and how to get it right
The APA citation generator is the right choice for any paper in psychology, education, nursing, business or other social and behavioural sciences. APA 7th edition uses an author-date in-text format such as (Smith, 2024) and a reference list ordered alphabetically by surname. Our generator handles all the fiddly bits automatically: hanging indents, ampersand vs. "and", DOIs rendered as https://doi.org/... URLs, sentence-case article titles and italicised journal names.
Common use cases: APA reference for a journal article, APA citation for a book chapter, APA website citation with no author, APA in-text citation generator, APA 7 reference list for a thesis. Need a different format? Switch the tab to MLA, Chicago or Harvard and the same metadata is re-rendered instantly.
Frequently asked questions
Is this APA generator free?
Yes. The Citation Generator is free to use. You only need to sign up if you want to save citations into a Project.
Where does the data come from?
We query Crossref, the largest open registry of scholarly DOIs, and render the output through the official Citation Style Language.