APA Citation Generator

These examples are produced by this generator, so what you see is exactly what you'll get:

Four pieces, always in this order: who (authors, inverted with initials), when (year in parentheses), what (title in sentence case — only the first word, proper nouns, and the first word after a colon capitalized), and where (the journal, publisher, or site, plus a DOI or URL).

Italics follow a simple rule: italicize the container — the journal name and volume number, the book title, or the standalone web page title. Article titles within journals stay in plain text.

Every reference pairs with in-text citations in author–date form: (Rasch & Born, 2013) for a paraphrase, or (Rasch & Born, 2013, p. 685) when quoting directly. Three or more authors shorten to (Harris et al., 2020) from the first citation. If you name the authors in your sentence, only the year goes in parentheses: "Rasch and Born (2013) showed that…"

No author? Use the first words of the title in quotes: ("Sleep and memory," 2024). No date? Use n.d.: (World Health Organization, n.d.).

• Organization as author — written in full, not inverted: National Sleep Foundation. (2024).
• No author — the title moves into the author position.
• No date — (n.d.) replaces the year.
• 21+ authors — first 19 listed, then an ellipsis, then the final author (APA 7's exact rule).
• Websites — the site name appears after the title; the access date is only added for content designed to change.

APA sentence-cases an article or web-page title: only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns are capitalised. Sleep-dependent memory consolidation, not Sleep-Dependent Memory Consolidation.

The generator does not apply that transformation, and the reason is that it cannot be applied safely. A title comes to us exactly as its publisher registered it in CrossRef or the page's own metadata. Lowercasing everything but the first word gives Dna methylation in alzheimer's disease — three errors introduced by a rule that was trying to help. Nothing in a string says which capital letters are names.

So the title you get is the source's own, and the one edit worth making by hand is to lowercase the ordinary words while leaving names, places, acronyms and trademarks alone. It takes a moment per reference and it is the only part of an APA entry a person still does better than a machine.

Beyond the big three, the same author–date skeleton covers everything. The patterns:

• Videos — the channel or creator is the author, the platform follows the italicized title.
• Reports — the issuing organization is both author and publisher; skip the repeated site name.
• Chapters in edited books — chapter author first, then "In" the editors and the book: see How to Cite a Book in APA.
• Podcasts, social posts, datasets — Manual Entry with the website type; the bracketed format note ([Audio podcast episode], [Tweet]) goes after the title.

Individual citations are half the job — the references page has its own rules: titled References (bold, centered), alphabetized by surname, double-spaced, hanging indents, and a strict one-to-one match with your in-text citations. Add each result here to your bibliography and the Builder assembles and exports the page to Word with all of that pre-applied. Full page rules: APA Reference Page.