ISBN to APA Converter
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Paste an ISBN and get an APA 7 book reference with its in-text citation. ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 both work, with or without hyphens. The book's record comes from OpenLibrary, with Google Books when OpenLibrary has none, so take ten seconds to check it against your copy.
How to convert an ISBN to APA
Step 1
Find the ISBN
It is on the back cover above the barcode and on the copyright page. 9780141033570 (ISBN-13) and 0-14-103357-6 (ISBN-10) are the same book; either works.
Step 2
Paste and convert
One ISBN per line, up to 50. Single citation gives each reference; Reference list sorts them; In-text citation gives (Kahneman, 2012).
Step 3
Check, then copy
Compare the authors, year and publisher with your copy's title page, then copy. The reference list keeps its italics when pasted into Word.
A real lookup, and what to check
ISBN 9780141033570 returns:
Kahneman, D. (2012). Thinking, fast and slow. Penguin.
That is a correct APA 7 book reference: author, year, title in italics, publisher, and no city. The title comes as the library record has it; this one is already in sentence case, as APA wants, but many book records use Title Case, and then you lowercase it yourself, keeping names. The year is the year of this paperback. If you read a different edition, cite the ISBN of that edition.
Book records are kept by libraries and volunteers, not deposited by publishers like DOI records, so they go wrong in ways a DOI rarely does. ISBN 9780262035613, the MIT Press book Deep learning, comes back with four authors, Goodfellow, Bengio, Courville and Bach, and the year 2017, the date that record gives. Francis Bach is the editor of the book series, not an author, and the book came out in 2016, so the correct reference is:
Goodfellow, I., Bengio, Y., & Courville, A. (2016). Deep learning. MIT Press.
What to check on every book:
- Authors. Series editors, translators and illustrators sometimes appear as authors. Compare with the title page.
- Year and edition. An ISBN belongs to one edition. If the record shows a reprint year, use the year on your copy's copyright page. For a later edition, APA adds it after the title: Title (3rd ed.).
- Publisher. You may get the parent company where the book names an imprint. Use the name on the title page.
Citing a chapter instead of the whole book
An ISBN identifies the whole book. For a chapter in an edited book, keep the book details and add the chapter author, the chapter title, the editors and the pages:
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.
Frequently asked questions
No. APA 7 dropped the location; the reference ends with the publisher, or with a DOI if the book has one. "New York, NY:" before the publisher means the reference was made in APA 6.
Check the ISBN on your own copy's copyright page, not one from a search result: each edition and format has its own ISBN. If the record is still wrong, correct the year and edition by hand.
Yes, up to 50, one per line, and you can mix in DOIs and PubMed IDs. Choose Reference list for a sorted list.
The same way as the print book: APA 7 does not mark the format. If the e-book has a DOI, it goes at the end.
Yes, use the ISBN to BibTeX converter for a @book entry.
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