APA Citation Generator
Free. No signup. Runs in your browser.
Paste a DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID or ISBN and get an APA 7th edition reference built from the publisher's own record: author names, year, volume, pages and DOI are looked up, not typed. The same tool gives you the whole reference list, sorted, or the in-text citations.
How to create an APA citation
Step 1
Paste the source
A DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID or ISBN, or their links. Up to 50 at once, one per line, mixed in any order. To use a whole library, set From to BibTeX, RIS, EndNote or PubMed (.nbib) and upload the export.
Step 2
Choose what you need
APA is already the style. Under I want, pick Single citation for one reference each, Reference list for the sorted list at the end of your paper, or In-text citation for (LeCun et al., 2015).
Step 3
Copy it
Copy takes one result; Copy all takes them all. The reference list copies with italics and the hanging indent, so it pastes into Word or Google Docs ready to use.
Each lookup goes from your browser to CrossRef, Europe PMC, arXiv or OpenLibrary. If one source cannot be found, the result says why and the rest still convert.
APA 7 format by source type
These are real references the generator produced. Italics are as APA wants them: the journal name and volume for articles, the title for books.
Journal article
LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning. Nature, 521(7553), 436–444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539
Book
Kahneman, D. (2012). Thinking, fast and slow. Penguin.
Chapter in an edited book (from a .bib entry)
Rumelhart, D. E., Hinton, G. E., & Williams, R. J. (1988). Learning representations by back-propagating errors. In J. A. Anderson & E. Rosenfeld (Eds.), Neurocomputing: Foundations of research (pp. 696–699). MIT Press.
Preprint
Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2018). BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding (arXiv:1810.04805). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1810.04805
arXiv registers that title in Title Case, and the generator keeps every title as it was registered. APA wants sentence case, so before you submit it becomes BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding.
A conference paper with a DOI comes out like a journal article, with the proceedings in place of the journal. For a chapter, look up the book's ISBN and add the chapter title, its authors and pages; an ISBN only identifies the whole book.
The APA rules it applies for you
- Up to 20 authors. All authors are listed up to 20. With 21 or more: the first 19, an ellipsis, then the last author.
- DOIs as links.
https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539, neverdoi:10.1038/...(that was APA 6). - & in references, "and" in sentences. (LeCun et al., 2015) and LeCun et al. (2015) for three or more authors; (Jordan & Mitchell, 2015) and Jordan and Mitchell (2015) for two.
- 1948a and 1948b. Two works by the same authors in the same year get letters, in the reference list and in the text: (Shannon, 1948a). Paste them together so the letters can be worked out across the set.
- n.d. A source with no date gets (n.d.) in place of the year.
Check these before you submit
The generator works from the record the publisher deposited. Three things are worth a look:
- Titles in Title Case. APA wants sentence case: only the first word, the first word after a colon and names keep a capital. The generator keeps each title exactly as the publisher registered it, because no tool can reliably tell a name from an ordinary word. Most journals register sentence case already; when a title arrives in Title Case, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", lowercase it yourself, "A mathematical theory of communication", and keep the names.
- Gaps in the record. Some publishers deposit no issue or page numbers. If a reference looks short, compare it with the first page of the article.
- Conference papers typed as articles. CrossRef sometimes files a proceedings paper as a journal article. The reference still reads correctly in most cases, but check that the proceedings title is in italics where the journal would be.
Making the reference list
Choose Reference list under I want and paste every source you cited, in any order, in one go. Five real sources pasted in a random order came back like this:
Jordan, M. I., & Mitchell, T. M. (2015). Machine learning: Trends, perspectives, and prospects. Science, 349(6245), 255–260. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa8415
Kahneman, D. (2012). Thinking, fast and slow. Penguin.
LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning. Nature, 521(7553), 436–444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539
Shannon, C. E. (1948a). A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 27(3), 379–423. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x
Shannon, C. E. (1948b). A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 27(4), 623–656. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb00917.x
Sorted by surname, with 1948a and 1948b worked out across the set (Shannon's paper came out in two parts). The Shannon titles are as the publisher registered them; for APA, write "A mathematical theory of communication". Copy all and paste it under a bold, centred References heading on a new page, double-spaced. The hanging indent comes with the paste; if your editor strips it, set a 0.5 inch hanging indent under Paragraph in Word, or Format, Align and indent in Google Docs. List only the sources you cite.
APA 7 vs APA 6
The generator follows APA 7, the edition published in 2019. If older references look different, these are the five places the editions differ:
| What changes | APA 6 | APA 7 |
|---|---|---|
| In-text, 3 to 5 authors | All names the first time, then et al. | (LeCun et al., 2015) from the first citation |
| Authors in the reference list | Up to 7, then the first 6, an ellipsis and the last | Up to 20, then the first 19, an ellipsis and the last |
| DOI | doi:10.1038/nature14539 | https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539 |
| Book publisher | Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. | MIT Press. |
| Web sources | Retrieved from https://... | The URL alone |
To tell which edition a list uses, look at one reference with a DOI: https://doi.org/ is APA 7, doi: is APA 6. To update an APA 6 list, paste its DOIs and ISBNs above and take the Reference list output.
Frequently asked questions
APA 7, the edition published in 2019 and in use now. The table above lists the five differences from APA 6. The Concise Guide to APA Style (7th edition) follows the same rules, so references made here are valid for both.
Paste the DOI, or its doi.org link, into the box above and convert. The reference ends with the DOI as a link, https://doi.org/..., which is the form APA 7 requires.
No. Every citation here is built from a database record, and web pages and videos have none. Write those by hand following the APA examples for webpages.
The generator keeps each title as the publisher registered it. APA wants sentence case, so lowercase those yourself, keeping names and acronyms. A tool cannot reliably tell a name from an ordinary word, so it does not change titles for you.
Yes. Paste them together, one per line, in any order, up to 50 at a time. Each line is looked up in the right database and they all land in one sorted list.
It is free and needs no signup. Lookups go from your browser to the public databases, and files are read in your browser, never uploaded to our server. Results are gone when you close the tab.
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