Free tool
APA citation generator
Get an APA 7th edition reference and in-text citation from a DOI or a title. No sign-in, and nothing you type is stored.
Generate an APA citation
What APA style is for
APA style comes from the American Psychological Association. It is used across psychology, education, nursing, business and the social sciences, where how recent a study is matters to the reader.
In the text you give the author's surname and the year. The reference list at the end gives the full details, in alphabetical order by first author.
Example: a journal article in APA
Reference list entry
In-text citation
(Poropat, 2009)
When you quote, add the page: (Poropat, 2009, p. 330). With two authors, join them with an ampersand: (Smith & Jones, 2020). With three or more, give the first author and et al.
What it can and can't find
The generator looks works up in Crossref and OpenAlex, two large indexes of published research. Journal articles and conference papers with a DOI are covered best.
Websites, most books without a DOI, reports, theses and very new work are often missing, or have thin records. For those, choose “Enter details manually” and type the details from the source itself.
Index records can be wrong or incomplete: a missing issue number, a title in capitals, an author's name spelled another way. Check each citation against the source before you hand it in.
FAQ
- Is the citation generator free?
- Yes. You don't need an account. If you send a lot of searches in a few minutes, the tool asks you to wait a moment before the next one.
- Do you store what I search for?
- No. Your search goes to our server, which looks it up in Crossref and OpenAlex and sends the citations back to your browser. We don't save the search or the results.
- Does it use AI?
- No. It doesn't use a language model. It takes the published record for the work and formats it with standard Citation Style Language (CSL) style files, the same kind many reference managers use.
- Why can't it find my source?
- Crossref and OpenAlex cover journal articles well, but websites, many books, reports, theses and very recent work are often missing. Try the DOI if the work has one, or add an author's surname to the title. If it still isn't found, choose “Enter details manually” and type its author, date, title and the other details from the source.
- Which edition of APA does it follow?
- The 7th edition, the current one.
- Why is the article title capitalised differently from my guide?
- APA puts article titles in sentence case, with only the first word and proper nouns capitalised. Many records give titles in title case, and the generator keeps the title as the record has it. Change the capitals by hand if they differ.