ISBN to APA Converter

How to convert an ISBN to APA

The ISBN is on the back cover near the barcode and on the copyright page inside. Either format is fine:

9780262035613
0-262-03561-8

You get back something like:

Zhang, W. (2019). A book about things. Example Press.

Note that APA 7 does not include the publisher’s city. APA 6 wanted “London, England: Example Press”, and the 7th edition dropped it. If you are matching a reference list built under the older edition, this is one of the visible differences.

As an apa book citation generator this handles single books well. For a chapter in an edited volume, an ISBN gets you the whole book rather than the chapter, so you will need to add the chapter title, its author, and its page range by hand.

What to check on an APA citation from an ISBN

This is the part that differs from a DOI lookup, and it is worth thirty seconds per book.

A DOI resolves to a record the publisher deposited and is contractually meant to keep accurate. An ISBN resolves to OpenLibrary, which is crowd-maintained, or to Google Books, which is derived from scanning and retailer data. Neither is wrong often, but both are incomplete more often than CrossRef, and in different ways.

Three fields to look at:

Edition. OpenLibrary frequently holds several records for the same work under different ISBNs, and an ISBN identifies one specific printing. If you are citing the third edition, make sure the reference says so, because the record may be for the first.

Publisher name. Imprints get recorded inconsistently. You may get the parent company where the book says the imprint, or a shortened trading name.

Author name form. Books are more likely than journals to hold an author as a single string rather than as structured given and family names, which can produce an odd initial. Compare against the title page.

The title, year, and ISBN itself are reliable. Those three fields are the ones worth a glance.

For several books at once, paste one ISBN per line. For a full sorted reference page, the APA reference list generator takes the same input and outputs the whole list. If you want BibTeX for LaTeX instead, use the ISBN to BibTeX converter.