Citation guides

APA Referencing: The Complete Guide with Examples (2026)

Everything you need for APA 7th edition — in-text citations, the reference list, and worked examples for books, journal articles, websites, reports, videos and AI tools, plus the cases students get wrong: three or more authors, no date, no author and secondary sources.

APA style, published by the American Psychological Association, is the most widely used citation system in psychology, education, nursing, business and the social sciences. It is an author-date system: you name the author and year in the sentence, then give the full details in a reference list at the end. This guide covers the 7th edition, current since 2019.

How APA referencing works

Every source appears in two places, and the two must match exactly. A reader finds (Berg, 2023) in your text, looks up Berg in the alphabetical reference list, and gets everything needed to retrieve the work. If a source is cited in the text it must appear in the reference list, and if it is in the reference list it must be cited somewhere in the text. The only routine exception is personal communication, which is cited in text but never listed.

APA in-text citations

One author

Two authors

Name both, every time. Use an ampersand inside parentheses and the word "and" in running text.

Three or more authors

APA 7 shortens to et al. from the first citation onwards. There is no longer a rule about writing all the names out the first time, which is the change most often missed by students working from an older guide.

Organisation as author

Write the name in full the first time. If the organisation has a well-known abbreviation, introduce it in the first citation and use it afterwards.

No date

Direct quotation with a page number

Same author, same year

Add letters to the year, assigned by the alphabetical order of the titles in your reference list. The same letters appear in both places.

Several sources in one citation

Order them alphabetically, exactly as they appear in the reference list, separated by semicolons.

A source quoted inside another source

The APA reference list

The list starts on a new page titled References, centred and bold. Entries are alphabetical by the first author's surname and use a hanging indent, meaning the first line sits at the margin and later lines are indented. Every entry answers four questions in the same order: who, when, what, where.

APA book reference

APA book with two to twenty authors

List every author up to twenty, with an ampersand before the last one. Note the asymmetry: you write et al. in the text from three authors, but the reference list stays complete.

APA book with twenty-one or more authors

Give the first nineteen, then an ellipsis, then the final author. No ampersand before the last name in this case.

APA chapter in an edited book

APA later edition

APA journal article with a DOI

Write the DOI as a full link. APA 7 dropped the old "doi:" prefix, and no full stop follows the URL. More patterns live in the journal article guide.

APA journal article without a DOI

If the article has no DOI and you read it in a database, stop after the page range. Add a URL only when the article sits on a freely available web page.

APA website reference

Give the full date when the page shows one. The site name goes where a publisher would, and it is omitted when the author and the site are the same organisation.

APA report or government publication

APA thesis or dissertation

APA video reference

The uploader is the author. See the YouTube guide for channel handles, timestamps and missing dates.

APA citation for ChatGPT and other AI tools

APA treats a generative model as software, with the company as author. Full detail, including how to write a disclosure statement, is in the AI citation guide.

APA reference with no author

Move the title into the author position. In the text, use a shortened title in quotation marks.

Quick-reference: APA in-text formats

Common mistakes in APA referencing

• Using title case for article titles. APA wants sentence case for article, chapter and book titles: "Coastal erosion in northern Europe", not "Coastal Erosion in Northern Europe". Journal names keep title case.
• Writing all authors in the text. From three authors, the in-text citation is always shortened to et al. in APA 7, including the first time.
• Shortening the reference list too. The list names every author up to twenty, no matter how the in-text citation looks.
• Leaving out the DOI. If an article has a DOI it belongs in the reference, written as a full https://doi.org/ link.
• Adding the publisher's city. APA 7 removed it. "Studentlitteratur" is complete; "Lund: Studentlitteratur" is an APA 6 habit.
• Listing personal communication. Interviews, emails and private messages are cited in the text only, because the reader cannot retrieve them.
• Guessing a year from a copyright footer. That is the site's date, not the page's. Use n.d. instead.

APA compared with Harvard

The two look similar and are easy to confuse, since both are author-date systems. The differences that matter in practice: APA shortens to et al. from three authors while most Harvard variants wait until four; APA separates author and year with a comma while many Harvard variants do not; and Harvard usually wants an access date for web pages, which APA only requires for pages designed to change. A full walkthrough is in the Harvard referencing guide.

Harvard has no single governing body, so departments publish their own variants. APA has one official manual, which makes it the more predictable of the two — check your course guide either way.