APA Citation Generator

The shape is: Author. (Year, Month Day). Title of the page in italics. Site Name. URL

Four things changed in the 7th edition and still trip people up.

"Retrieved from" is gone. APA 7 wants the bare URL, with no lead-in phrase and no full stop after it. A retrieval date is now only used for a page designed to change under you — a wiki, a live dashboard, a social media profile — and then it reads "Retrieved March 14, 2026, from URL".

The site name goes after the title, not before it, and it is not italicised. The page title is.

When an organisation wrote the page, the organisation is the author. If the author and the site name would be identical — a page on the WHO site written by the WHO — you give the author and omit the site name entirely.

And a page with no date really does read (n.d.). Markers see it as a gap in your sourcing rather than a formatting choice, so check the footer and any "last updated" line before you accept it.

The shape is: Author. (Year). Title of the book in italics (2nd ed.). Publisher.

The publisher's location is gone. APA 6 wanted "New York, NY: Random House"; APA 7 wants "Random House" and nothing more. This is the single most common out-of-date habit in student bibliographies, and it is visible at a glance.

The edition goes in brackets after the title, unitalicised, and only when it is not the first: (2nd ed.), (Rev. ed.), (3rd ed., Vol. 2).

An ebook is cited exactly like the print book. APA 7 removed format notes such as [Kindle edition]; if the ebook has a DOI, add it at the end, and if it only has a store link, leave the link off.

For an edited collection you cite the editors in the author position with (Ed.) or (Eds.) after them. For one chapter inside that collection, you cite the chapter — set "Source is a" to book chapter above, because the two references look nothing alike.

The shape is: Author. (Year). Article title in sentence case. Journal Name, 12(3), 45–58. https://doi.org/10.xxxx/yyyy

Notice what is italicised: the journal name and the volume number, but not the issue number in brackets and not the article title. Getting that pattern right is most of what a marker checks.

The DOI is required whenever the article has one, and it is written as a full https://doi.org/ link — not as "doi:10.1038/…", which was APA 6. There is no full stop after it.

Up to twenty authors are listed in full, with an ampersand before the last. Twenty-one or more: list the first nineteen, then an ellipsis, then the final author. In text it is (Smith et al., 2020) from the first mention as soon as there are three or more.

If the article is online-first with no issue or pages yet, give what exists and add "Advance online publication" before the DOI. Once it is assigned to an issue, update the reference — that is the one case where a reference genuinely goes stale.

The shape is: Uploader. (Year, Month Day). Title of the video [Video]. YouTube. URL

APA's rule is that the person or organisation that uploaded the video is the author, because they are who made it available. That is the channel name, and this page uses it.

Where a real name and a channel name are both known, APA writes the person first with the channel in square brackets: Smith, J. [SmithScience]. (2020, March 14). If the channel name is all you have — which is usual — the channel name alone is correct and is never inverted.

The [Video] bracket is not optional; it is how APA marks the medium, and it sits after the italicised title before the site name.

The upload date matters and is read from the page rather than guessed. If it comes back missing, it is under the video title on YouTube, and you should add it: a video reference with (n.d.) is a reference no one can verify.

Cite the speaker rather than the channel only when the channel is a platform hosting someone else's talk — a conference channel, for instance — and then name the speaker with the channel as the site.

Paste the address of a page, a DOI, or a book's ISBN. The source is looked up, and you get the reference-list entry and the in-text citation in APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 17 and Harvard — all four, every time, because the person who needs APA today needs MLA for the same source next term.

Underneath each reference is what most generators hide: a list of what was found and what was not. A missing date or author changes the reference in every style, and you cannot fix what you were not told about.

DOIs go to Crossref, which is where publishers register their metadata, so journal articles come back correct including volume, issue and page range. ISBNs go to Open Library, and so does a book title when the ISBN is not to hand — a title is a guess, and the result says so. Web pages are read from their own metadata.

Every citation generator is only as good as the metadata it was given, and web pages publish metadata carelessly.

The four failures worth knowing:

• No author. Blogs and institutional pages often publish none, so the entry starts with the title — correct only if the page really is anonymous. Check for a byline, and use the organisation if there is one.
• No date. You get n.d., which markers notice. It is usually in the footer, under the headline, or in a "last updated" line.
• The wrong title. Sites put their own name in the page title. It is stripped where it can be recognised; check the title matches the heading on the page.
• A staff byline. "Guardian Staff" or "Admin" is metadata, not an author.

None of this is exotic. It is the normal condition of the web, which is why the output tells you what it did not find.

APA wants sentence case for article and book titles. MLA and Chicago want title case. This tool changes neither, and that is deliberate.

A machine that re-cases titles also lower-cases proper nouns: "The Rise of Fascism in Europe" becomes "The rise of fascism in europe", and a marker sees a mistake you did not make. Re-casing correctly requires knowing which words are names, which is exactly what a formatter does not know.

So the rule here is: the title arrives as the source published it, and if your style wants a different case, you change it in your document — where you can see the proper nouns. For APA that usually means lower-casing everything after the first word and after a colon, leaving names capitalised.

A perfect reference list with wrong in-text citations still loses marks, so each style shows both forms: the parenthetical one, and the narrative one you use when the author is the subject of your sentence.

The differences are small and consistent. APA puts a comma before the year and an ampersand between two authors: (Smith & Jones, 2020). MLA uses no comma and a page: (Smith 45). Chicago author-date drops the comma before the year but keeps one before the page: (Smith 2020, 45). Harvard follows APA's commas but writes "and": (Smith and Jones, 2020, p. 45).

Three or more authors collapse to "et al." in every style, from the first citation.

Page numbers belong in the in-text citation, not the reference, for anything you quote directly: the reference gives the whole work, the citation says where you were looking.

Harvard is not a style. There is no Harvard manual, no committee and no edition number — it is a family of author-date conventions, and universities each publish their own variant.

What this produces follows Cite Them Right, which is what most UK institutions mean by Harvard and what most university libraries hand out: the year in brackets after the author, single quotes round article titles, italics on book and journal titles, and "Available at: … (Accessed: …)" at the end of a web reference.

If your department publishes its own guide, that guide wins over anything here — and the differences are usually punctuation rather than substance. Copy the reference, then match its commas to your handout once; every later reference follows the same pattern.

Every source downloads as BibTeX or RIS as well as text. BibTeX is what LaTeX and Overleaf read; RIS is what EndNote, Mendeley and library catalogues speak. Both are free, because a free tool that will not let you take your data out is not free.

For anything longer than an essay, use a reference manager. Zotero is free and open source, stores a source once and re-formats it into any style forever: it is the right tool for fifty sources, where a generator is the right tool for five.

This page is built for the five — the essay due tomorrow, the article a supervisor sent by link — without an account, without ads, and without emailing you.