APA 7 citation guide: references and in-text basics

How APA 7 citations work

APA style, set out in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition, is the standard in psychology, nursing, education, business and many social science courses in Canada. It is an author-date system. In the body of your paper you name the author and year; in the reference list at the end you give the full details so a reader can find the source.

The APA Style website breaks every reference into four elements: author (who), date (when), title (what) and source (where to find it, including any DOI or URL). Once you see that pattern, an unfamiliar source type is just a matter of filling in the four slots.

In-text citations: parenthetical and narrative

There are two forms. A parenthetical citation puts the author and year in brackets. A narrative citation makes the author part of your sentence and puts the year in brackets after the name.

• Use & inside brackets and and in a sentence.
• Use only the year in text, even when the reference has a full date.
• For a direct quotation, add the page: (Okafor, 2022, p. 14). For a range, use pp. A page number for a paraphrase is not required but can help readers find the passage.
• A quotation of 40 words or more becomes a block quotation: no quotation marks, indented 0.5 inch, with the citation after the final punctuation.

Reference examples for common source types

These follow the templates on the APA Style website. In a real reference list, the titles of books, reports and webpages, journal names and journal volume numbers are in italics. Article and chapter titles are not. Plain text cannot show italics here, so each example says which parts to italicize. One display note: APA joins page ranges with an en dash; this page shows a hyphen instead.

Setting up the reference list

1. Start the list on a new page after the text, with the label References in bold and centred.
2. Double-space the whole list, with no extra space between entries, and use a 0.5 inch hanging indent.
3. Put entries in alphabetical order by the first author's surname; a work with no author goes by its title.
4. List every author up to 20. With 21 or more, list the first 19, then an ellipsis, then the final author.
5. Check that every in-text citation has a reference and every reference is cited at least once.

Reference managers such as Zotero save time, but they copy whatever metadata the database holds, including wrong capitalization. Proofread each entry against the templates above.

Mistakes that cost marks

• Title Case in article titles. APA uses sentence case for article, book and webpage titles. Journal names keep title case.
• Writing "doi:" in front of the number. APA 7 formats DOIs as https://doi.org/ links.
• Including a publisher location. APA 7 dropped it.
• Using "et al." in the reference list. It belongs in text; the reference lists the authors.
• Citing the database instead of the article. You do not need "Retrieved from ProQuest" for a journal article.
• Quoting without a page number. Every direct quotation needs a location.

Citation is also part of academic integrity. Our academic writing course has a short lesson on citing and using sources, and the citation flashcards help the format rules stick.

APA versus MLA and other styles

MLA style, now in its ninth edition, is common in English and other humanities courses. It uses a "Works Cited" list rather than "References", and its in-text citations give the author and a page number rather than the year. Chicago and numbered styles such as IEEE appear in history, engineering and some science courses. None of these is more correct than another; the right one is the one your instructor names. If a lab report or assignment does not say, ask. For more help with the shift to university-level writing, see the high school to university guide.