APA 7th Edition Citation: In-Text, References and the Awkward Cases

The short answer

APA 7 cites in the running text with author and year — (Harper, 2020) — adding a locator for direct quotations: (Harper, 2020, p. 44). From three authors onward you write et al. at the very first citation. Every in-text citation must have exactly one matching entry in an alphabetical reference list, formatted as: Harper, J. (2020). Title of the work. Publisher. And every entry in that list must be cited somewhere in the text.

That last requirement is the one that fails silently. Formatting mistakes cost a mark; a reference list containing four works that appear nowhere in the text suggests the bibliography was assembled separately from the argument, which costs more.

How do in-text citations work in APA 7?

APA is an author–date system. There are no citation footnotes, no ibid., no op. cit. Each citation takes one of two shapes.

Parenthetical — the finding leads:
Sleep restriction impairs working memory before participants report feeling tired (Okonkwo, 2019).

Narrative — the researcher leads:
Okonkwo (2019) found that self-reported alertness lagged behind measured decline.

Two habits separate a clean text from a messy one, and neither is about formatting:

• Put the citation where the borrowed claim is, not at the end of the paragraph. A citation after the final sentence of a nine-line paragraph leaves the reader unable to tell how far the borrowing extends. If a whole passage comes from one source, signal it at the start: Okonkwo (2019) describes three mechanisms. The first …
• Multiple sources in one parenthesisare ordered alphabetically and separated by semicolons: (Delgado & Rowe, 2021; Okonkwo, 2019; Whitfield et al., 2023). Not by year, not by importance.

Repeating a narrative citation within the same paragraph does not need the year every time once the source is unambiguous — but the moment a second source enters the paragraph, put the year back. Ambiguity is the thing to avoid, not repetition.

When do I need a page number?

Always for a direct quotation. For paraphrases APA 7 encourages a locator but does not require one. Many departments require it everywhere; check your style sheet, because it overrides the manual.

Short quotation (fewer than 40 words) runs inside the paragraph in quotation marks, with the citation before the closing punctuation:
The authors describe the effect as "a decline that instruments detect long before people do" (Okonkwo, 2019, p. 87).

Block quotation (40 words or more) is set as an indented block with no quotation marks, and the citation comes after the closing full stop. That reversal is one of the few places APA genuinely flips the punctuation, and it is a reliable giveaway when it is done inconsistently.

When there are no page numbers, use whatever locator the source does offer:

• Paragraph number on a web page: (Delgado & Rowe, 2021, para. 6)
• Named section: (World Health Organization, 2022, Methods section)
• Heading plus paragraph, for long pages: (Delgado & Rowe, 2021, Results, para. 2)
• Timestamp for audio or video: (Okonkwo, 2019, 14:22)

How many authors before et al.?

The APA 6 habit to unlearn: listing every author at the first mention and shortening afterwards. APA 7 uses et al. from three authors onward from the first citation. If your document says (Whitfield, Amari, & Lund, 2023) in the introduction and (Whitfield et al., 2023) in the discussion, you inherited an APA 6 template.

The disambiguation exception: if shortening would make two different sources look identical — say Whitfield, Amari and Lund (2023) and Whitfield, Amari and Sorensen (2023) — spell out as many names as it takes to tell them apart, then et al.

Ampersand placement:& inside parentheses and in the reference list; the word "and" in running prose. It is a small thing that is wrong in a surprising number of submitted drafts, because generators emit the parenthetical form and it gets pasted into a sentence.

What does the reference list look like?

One alphabetical list, no numbering, no separate sections by source type, with a hanging indent — first line flush left, subsequent lines indented. In Word that is a paragraph setting, not something you build with tabs; tab-built indents collapse the moment the text reflows.

Book:
Harper, J. (2020). The measurement of attention. Cambridge University Press.

Chapter in an edited book:
Delgado, M., & Rowe, S. (2021). Field methods under time pressure. In A. Nakamura (Ed.), Handbook of applied cognition (pp. 211–238). Routledge.

Journal article with a DOI:
Whitfield, R., Amari, D., & Lund, P. (2023). Sleep restriction and working memory: A within-subjects replication. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 35(4), 402–419. https://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2023.2187654

Journal article without a DOI, read in a database:
Okonkwo, C. (2019). Alertness and self-report. Applied Ergonomics, 78, 84–92.
No database name, no URL. APA 7 treats most academic databases as the equivalent of a library shelf: where you found it is not part of the citation.

Four rules the pattern encodes:

• No place of publication.APA 7 dropped it. "London: Routledge" is APA 6.
• The DOI is a full URLin the form https://doi.org/… — no "doi:" prefix, no "Retrieved from". Where a DOI exists it takes precedence over the publisher URL.
• Sentence case for titles of works — capitalise the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns. Journal names, by contrast, keep title case and are italicised along with the volume number.
• Up to 20 authors are named in full.Only from 21 do you list the first 19, insert an ellipsis, and add the final author. "et al." does not appear in the reference list.

How do I cite a website or an online report?

A web page is not a special species. Identify who is responsible, when it was published, what it is called, and where it sits.

Page on an organisation's site, where the site name differs from the author:
Ferreira, L. (2024, 11 June). Why replication rates differ by field. Nature Careers. https://www.nature.com/…

Report where the organisation is both author and publisher — the publisher is not repeated:
World Health Organization. (2022). Mental health and work: Policy brief. https://www.who.int/…

Preprint:
Amari, D., & Lund, P. (2025). Attention decay in remote assessment [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/xxxxx

Retrieval dates are the part people get wrong in both directions. APA 7 wants one only when the content is designed to change and is not archived — a live statistics dashboard, a wiki page, a profile. A dated report in PDF form does not need one. Adding a retrieval date where it is not needed is a blemish; omitting one where the page will have changed by the time it is read is a real problem. If you cannot tell, add it.

And archive the page the day you cite it. Between your literature review and your submission there may be six months, and dead links in a reference list are both avoidable and conspicuous.

No author, no date, no page: the awkward cases

• No author.The title moves into the author slot, and the in-text citation uses a shortened form: ("Climate risk in coastal cities," 2024). Article and web page titles take quotation marks; book and report titles are italicised.
• No date. Use (n.d.) — in both the citation and the reference entry: (Ferreira, n.d.). A source with neither an author nor a date is worth a second look before you solve the formatting problem; it may not be citable at all.
• Two first authors with the same surname. Add initials in the in-text citation: (J. Harper, 2020) and (M. Harper, 2018), even though the years differ.
• Same author, same year. Suffix the years a, b, c — assigned by the alphabetical order of the titles in the reference list, and used identically in the text.
• Secondary source. (Vygotsky, 1978, as cited in Harper, 2020, p. 44). Only Harper goes in the reference list. Presenting a source you have not read as if you had is no longer a formatting question.
• Personal communication— interviews, emails, unrecorded lectures — is cited in the text only, with the date, and does not appear in the reference list, because the reader cannot retrieve it. For your own research interviews, follow your ethics approval and your department's data rules instead.

What actually goes wrong

1. Two editions in one document. A publisher location on one book and not the next, full author lists in chapter two and et al. in chapter four. This is the most common deduction and the easiest to prevent, because it is mechanical.
2. Quotation marks with no locator. The quotation marks create the expectation; the missing page number is what the eye lands on.
3. DOIs that do not resolve. A plausible-looking DOI produced by a chatbot resolves to nothing. Paste every one into a browser before you submit — it takes minutes and a fabricated reference is treated far more seriously than a formatting slip.
4. Suffixes that drift. The text says (Harper, 2020a) and the list gives the same work as 2020b, usually because a source was added late and the letters were never reassigned.
5. Entries with no citation, citations with no entry. The hardest fault to catch yourself, because proofreading follows the argument and never audits the list against it.

The last one needs a mechanical check rather than another read-through. Our citation check reconciles the in-text markers against the reference list and flags quoted passages with no attribution nearby. It does not return a similarity score or percentage — it cannot measure that, and we do not claim otherwise.

Choosing what to cite is the other half of the job. For where to search, see how to find academic sources; for judging what you find, see how to find credible sources.