APA In-Text Citation Generator
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Paste a DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID, or ISBN and get both APA 7 in-text forms back: the parenthetical (LeCun et al., 2015) and the narrative LeCun et al. (2015). Add a page number if you are quoting directly. The matching reference list entry comes back with them, so the year suffixes agree. You can also upload a .bib, .ris, .enw, or .nbib file and do a whole set at once.
The two APA in-text citation formats: parenthetical and narrative
APA 7 gives you two ways to cite in text, and they are not interchangeable.
Parenthetical puts everything in brackets, usually at the end of the sentence: (Sanders & Jang, 2020). Narrative puts the author names into the sentence itself and leaves only the year in brackets: Sanders and Jang (2020) found that....
The conjunction changes between them. Parenthetical uses an ampersand. Narrative spells out the word “and”. That is APA Style’s own guidance on parenthetical versus narrative citations.
This in text citation generator gives you both forms for every source, so you pick whichever one fits the sentence you are writing rather than reshaping the sentence around whatever the tool handed you.
Page numbers sit on top of either form. APA requires a locator for direct quotations, not for paraphrase, though it encourages one when it would help a reader find the passage. Type the page into the field on any row and both forms update: p. 14 for a single page, pp. 14-17 for a range. The label switches on its own. Non-numeric locators work too, so para. 4 is fine for a source with no pagination.
Sources with no publication date come back as n.d. in place of the year, in both forms and in the reference entry, with nothing to configure.
How this in text citation generator handles et al., year suffixes, and the ampersand
Three APA 7 rules decide what comes out, and two of them depend on information outside the citation you are looking at.
et al. starts at three authors. APA 7 uses the first author plus et al. for any work with three or more authors, in every citation including the first. Two authors are always both named. This changed in the 7th edition, which is worth knowing if you are working from an older handout: APA 6 spelled out up to five authors on first mention and only dropped to et al. at six.
Year suffixes are assigned across your whole set. Cite two 2015 papers by the same authors and APA needs 2015a and 2015b. Which one gets a is decided alphabetically by title, as the entries fall in the reference list, so the letter is a property of the pair rather than of either citation. Paste both sources in together and the suffixes are worked out across the set and applied to the in-text marks and the reference entries at the same time. Paste them in separate runs and there is nothing to compare against, so you get the same year twice.
The ampersand is switched for narrative form. CSL, the style language behind most citation tools, has no way to express “use & in parentheses and the word and in a sentence” in a single citation layout, so the official APA style file hardcodes the ampersand. We render the narrative form from a separately corrected copy of that file with the conjunction flipped in the one macro the citation layout touches, and leave the parenthetical form and the reference list rendering untouched. That is why the two forms here differ by more than their brackets.
Frequently asked questions
No. The tool works from a DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID, ISBN, or an uploaded reference file. If you paste a URL it will say so rather than guessing. Every citation here is built from metadata held by CrossRef, Europe PMC, arXiv, or OpenLibrary, and a web page has nothing equivalent to check against. For a website you will need to write the citation by hand.
A parenthetical citation goes either immediately after the quotation or at the end of the sentence. For a narrative citation, the author and year sit in the sentence itself and the page number goes in parentheses after the quotation.
Yes, switch the output style in the tool. Numeric styles like IEEE and Vancouver have only one in-text form, so the narrative row disappears for those. [1] is [1] wherever it sits in the sentence.
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