APA Citation
Service overview
What you get with APA Citation
APA citation support at AMDEX Scholar Labs is checking, correction and explanation work on referencing done to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, seventh edition. APA is an author-date style: a surname and a year sit in the running text, and an alphabetical reference list at the end holds a full entry for every source cited. It is common on psychology, education, nursing and social science courses in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and Ireland. Marks tend to go on small, repeatable details — a journal name put in sentence case, a DOI still carrying the old doi: prefix, et al. used for a two-author source, a hanging indent typed with spaces. This page sets out what APA 7 asks for, in the text and in the reference list, and where checking and explanation fit around it.
- Guidance built around your own brief and your marking rubric
- Matched to a specialist who works in your subject area
- Referencing explained and checked in your institution’s style — APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago and more
- Feedback on your drafts while there is still time to act on it
- Worked examples supplied as labelled models to study and cite, never to submit
- Human expertise — nothing here is generated by AI
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What is APA 7th edition, and what changed from APA 6th?
APA 7 is the current edition of the Publication Manual, released in October 2019 and carrying a 2020 copyright — which is why the manual's own reference entry reads 2020 — and it is the version most courses now mark against. The underlying style did not change: it remains author-date, with a surname and year in the text and an alphabetised reference list at the end. What changed is a set of mechanics, and a reference built from a sixth-edition handout will usually read as wrong. If your module still links an older guide, follow what your course sets and ask which edition the marker is using — a paper that is half sixth edition and half seventh is more visible than either done consistently.
- Publisher location dropped: the publisher's name alone is enough, with no city or state.
- "Retrieved from" dropped, unless a retrieval date is genuinely needed.
- DOIs written as full https://doi.org/ links rather than with a doi: prefix.
- Up to 20 authors listed in full in a reference entry, against 7 in APA 6.
- et al. used from three authors onwards, at the first citation rather than the second.
- No running head required on student papers; the page number alone sits top right.
How do I write an APA in-text citation?
An APA in-text citation carries the author's surname and the year of publication, either in brackets after the material — (Marsden, 2021) — or woven into the sentence as Marsden (2021) argued. Use an ampersand between two names inside brackets, (Marsden & Okoye, 2021), and the word "and" when the names run through your own sentence. A direct quotation also needs a locator: p. 12 for a single page, pp. 12–14 for a range, and para. 4 or a section heading when the source has no page numbers. Group authors can be abbreviated after first use, as in (American Psychological Association [APA], 2020), and thereafter (APA, 2020). Several sources in one bracket are listed alphabetically and separated by semicolons.
How is an APA reference list ordered and formatted?
The reference list starts on a new page under the heading References, centred and bold, double-spaced throughout, with a hanging indent of half an inch on every line after the first — set that with the paragraph ruler rather than the tab key, so it survives reformatting. Entries are alphabetised letter by letter on the first author's surname. Every in-text citation must lead to an entry, and every entry must be cited somewhere in the text; anything you read but did not cite belongs in a bibliography, which APA papers normally do not have.
- Nothing precedes something: Brown, J. comes before Browning, T.
- A single-author entry precedes a multi-author entry beginning with the same surname.
- Same first author, different co-authors: alphabetise on the second author's surname.
- Same authors across several years: earliest year first.
- Same authors and the same year: add 2024a, 2024b, lettered by title order, and use those letters in the text too.
- Up to twenty authors: list them all. Twenty-one or more: list the first nineteen, insert an ellipsis, then the final author's name, with no ampersand.
Sentence case or title case — which APA titles take capitals?
Sentence case is for the title of the work itself; title case is for the name of the periodical it appeared in. So an article title takes capitals on the first word of the title, the first word of any subtitle or the first word after a colon or em dash, proper nouns, and nouns followed by a numeral or letter — Experiment 2, Table 3, Grade 5, Type II — with everything else in lower case. The journal name, by contrast, keeps capitals on all major words, which in APA means every word of four letters or more as well as the nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and pronouns. The same sentence case applies to book titles, chapter titles, report titles and webpage titles in the reference list. Italics follow a different split: the journal name and volume number are italicised, the issue number in brackets is not, and a book or report title is italicised while an article or chapter title is not. In the running text, titles of works are given in title case.
How should DOIs, URLs and database sources appear?
A DOI is presented as a full link, https://doi.org/10.1037/xxxxxxx, with no doi: label in front and no full stop after it. Include it whether you read the article in print or on screen. Where there is no DOI and you found the article through an ordinary research database such as PsycInfo, EBSCOhost or ProQuest, give no URL at all: the entry is formatted as though it were print, because those links will not resolve for a reader. There are two exceptions. A database that publishes original, proprietary material available nowhere else — UpToDate, or the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews — takes the database name and the URL, with the name in italic title case, handled like a journal title. A work of limited circulation held in a database — a dissertation, a preprint in an archive, a monograph in ERIC — also takes the name and the URL, but there the database name is plain title case with no italics, handled like a publisher. Otherwise include a URL only for material that sits openly online without a DOI, and add a retrieval date only when the page is designed to change and is not archived.
What does APA support at AMDEX Scholar Labs involve?
A reference list is read entry by entry against APA 7 — DOIs as https://doi.org/ links, article titles in sentence case against journal names in title case, italics on the journal name and volume but not the issue number, a hanging indent of half an inch set with the ruler — and returned marked up, each change tied to the rule behind it rather than silently corrected. In-text citations are cross-checked against the list in both directions, which is how orphans and gaps surface. Where a source type is awkward — twenty-one or more authors needing the ellipsis form, a group author to abbreviate on first use, an article with a DOI but no page numbers — a worked example is built on a parallel source. Referencing is also checked within essay editing and proofreading, and it recurs in psychology assignment support. Assessed writing stays yours: the drafting is your work, and this support sits around it.
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APA Citation: common questions
From three authors onwards, and from the first citation — APA 7 removed the sixth edition's rule about naming everyone the first time. A two-author work names both authors every single time. If two sources would shorten to the same first author and year, give as many surnames as it takes to tell them apart, then et al. In the reference list, et al. never appears: up to twenty authors are named in full, and from twenty-one you give the first nineteen, an ellipsis, then the last author.
Not required, though APA encourages one where it would assist a reader in finding the passage in a long book or a dense chapter. For a direct quotation it is compulsory: p. for a single page, pp. for a range. When the source has no pagination, point to something else that locates the material — a paragraph number, a section heading, a timestamp. Quotations of forty words or more are set as an indented block with no quotation marks.
Name the original in your sentence and cite the source you actually handled: Vygotsky's 1934 study (as cited in Wertsch, 1985). Only Wertsch appears in the reference list, because that is the text you read. Track down the original where you can — markers notice a chain of secondary citations, and details drift as claims are passed along. Secondary citation is meant for genuinely unobtainable sources: out of print, untranslated, or a conference paper with no record.
No. APA has no ibid. and no op. cit., and it does not place citations in footnotes — citing the same source again means repeating the surname, and in parenthetical citations the year as well. A narrative citation repeated inside the same paragraph may drop the year, provided the source cannot be confused with another. Footnotes exist in APA only for content notes and copyright attributions, marked with superscript numbers. The styles set side by side shows where author-date, numeric and footnote systems part company.
Yes — that is standard support. A reference-list check runs entry by entry through the APA 7 details that lose marks: DOIs rendered as https://doi.org/ links with no doi: prefix and no full stop trailing them, article and book titles in sentence case against journal names in title case, italics on the journal name and volume but not on the issue number in brackets, database URLs stripped out of PsycInfo, EBSCOhost and ProQuest entries, et al. applied from three authors in the text and never inside the list itself, and 2024a/2024b letters matched between the list and the text. In-text citations are then read against the list in both directions. You can send the files through with your module code and deadline, plus any referencing guide your department publishes, since that is the version that decides.
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