APA Citation Generator

What this APA citation generator does with titles, DOIs, and author lists

These three are where generated APA references most often disagree with what a marker expects, and all three are decided by the source metadata rather than by the citation style.

Titles are sentence case, journal names are title case. APA capitalises only the first word of an article or chapter title, plus proper nouns and anything after a colon. The journal name keeps its own capitalisation. So you get:

LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning and the future of machine vision. Nature, 521(7553), 436-444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539

Note “Deep learning and the future of machine vision” in sentence case and Nature in title case, in the same reference. If a publisher stores the title already title-cased, this apa citation generator lowercases it to APA’s rule, but it cannot know that a word like “Bayesian” is a proper noun. Scan the titles after generating and re-capitalise anything that should have stayed capitalised. This is the single most common thing to fix by hand.

DOIs are full URLs. APA 7 renders a DOI as https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539. Not doi:10.1038/..., which was APA 6, and not a bare number. If you are copying references out of an older document, this is a give-away that they were made under the previous edition.

Author lists run to 20. In the reference list, APA 7 names up to 20 authors in full. At 21 or more you give the first 19, an ellipsis, then the final author. That is a different threshold from the in-text citation, which drops to first author plus et al. at three. Both are applied here.

The ampersand belongs in reference entries and parenthetical citations, and the word “and” belongs in narrative ones. That split is covered on the APA in-text citation generator page.

Using it as an APA reference generator, a reference list builder, or an in-text citation tool

The output picker changes the shape of what comes back, not just the style.

Pick a reference list and the entries come back sorted alphabetically by first author surname, with 2015a and 2015b assigned across the set where two works share authors and a year. That assignment is only possible when the tool can see every entry, so paste all your sources in one go rather than one at a time. The APA reference list generator is the same engine with the reference page as the default.

Pick in-text and you get the parenthetical and narrative forms for each source, plus a field for a page number when you are quoting directly.

Pick a reference file and you get BibTeX, RIS, CSV, Excel, or CSL-JSON, which is what you want if you are moving sources into Zotero, Mendeley, or a LaTeX bibliography rather than into prose. If you are writing in LaTeX, take the .bib output from the DOI to BibTeX converter and let biblatex handle the APA formatting at compile time instead.

Everything here is APA 7, current since 2019. The style file comes from the CSL Style Repository, the same source Zotero, Mendeley, and Pandoc use, so it tracks the published edition. The APA 7th edition citation generator page lists exactly what changed from APA 6 if you have older references to check. Note also that every citation needs a DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID, ISBN, or a reference file behind it, so websites, lectures, and videos are not covered.