APA 7 Citation Generator

What an APA 7 citation generator changes compared with APA 6

The 7th edition came out in 2019. For journal articles and books, which is most of what anyone cites, the changes are contained:

et al. now starts at three authors. APA 6 spelled out up to five authors on first mention and only shortened at six. APA 7 uses the first author plus et al. for three or more, in every citation including the first. This is the change most likely to affect your in-text citations.

Reference lists name up to 20 authors. APA 6 stopped at seven, with an ellipsis before the final author. APA 7 lists all authors up to 20, and only at 21 or more gives the first 19, an ellipsis, then the last one.

DOIs are full URLs. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539 rather than APA 6’s doi:10.1038/nature14539. The “Retrieved from” prefix before URLs is gone too, unless you need a retrieval date for a source that changes over time.

Publisher location is dropped for books. APA 6 wanted “New York, NY: Routledge”. APA 7 wants just “Routledge”.

There are further changes around inclusive language, bias-free wording, and the format of student papers, which matter for your prose and title page but do not change what a reference looks like.

How to tell whether existing references are APA 6 or APA 7

You do not need to regenerate a reference list to find out. Look at any one reference with a DOI and check three things:

The DOI. Starts with https://doi.org/ means 7th. Starts with doi: means 6th. 2. A book’s publisher. A city before the publisher name means 6th. 3. A source with a URL. The words “Retrieved from” before the link mean 6th, unless there is a genuine retrieval date attached.

If all three look like APA 7, the reference list is almost certainly fine. The in-text citations are the separate job: search your document for any citation naming three or more authors in full and shorten it to et al.

If the list does need redoing, paste the DOIs into the tool above and take the reference list output rather than fixing entries one by one. The APA reference list generator sorts the result and handles the 2015a and 2015b letters across the whole set, which is fiddly to do by hand.

Two questions the sections above do not answer

My department still requires APA 6. Can I use this? You can generate APA 7 and convert back, since the differences are the bounded list above: change the DOI prefix, add publisher locations for books, and lengthen the in-text citations to spell out up to five authors on first mention. For a long reference list that is slower than it sounds, so check whether the requirement is real before doing it. Departmental handbooks often lag the edition by years without anyone intending them to.

Is APA 7 the same as the 7th edition Concise Guide? The Concise Guide is the student-focused edition of the same 7th edition rules. References are formatted identically, so anything produced here is valid under either. The Concise Guide omits the material aimed at journal submission, which is why it is thinner and cheaper, not different.