APA 7 Journal Article Citation: Format and Example

The reference-list pattern

A journal article reference has four parts: author, date, title, and source.

• Author: surname, then initials. Separate authors with commas and put an ampersand (&) before the last one.
• Date: the year of publication in parentheses, followed by a period.
• Title: the article title in sentence case (capitalize only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns). It is not italicized or placed in quotation marks.
• Source: the journal name in title case and italics, then the volume in italics, the issue in parentheses (not italicized), the page range, and finally the DOI as a full link.

Example: LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning. Nature, 521(7553), 436–444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539 (In your document, italicize Nature and 521.)

The in-text citation

In the body of the paper, cite the author surname and year. With one or two authors, give the surnames every time: (Smith, 2020) or (Smith & Jones, 2020). With three or more authors, use the first surname followed by et al.: (LeCun et al., 2015). For a narrative citation, write the surnames in your sentence and put only the year in parentheses: LeCun et al. (2015) showed that…

DOIs and links

When an article has a DOI, include it as a link in the form https://doi.org/… and do not add a retrieval date. A DOI is a persistent identifier, so it keeps working even if the publisher's website changes. Many reference managers can look up a DOI for you, but metadata is sometimes incomplete or wrongly capitalized, so always read the result.

Common errors

• Title case in the article title. Use sentence case for the article, title case for the journal.
• Missing or wrong volume and issue numbers. Check the publisher page, not just a search-result snippet.
• Listing authors in a different order from the publication.
• Using a hyphen in page ranges. Use an en dash (436–444).
• Mismatches between the in-text citation and the reference list. Every in-text citation needs a matching entry and the reverse.

Ordering the reference list

Entries are sorted alphabetically by the first author's surname, ignoring a leading 'A', 'An' or 'The' in titles when there is no author. Use a hanging indent so the first line of each entry is flush left and later lines are indented. If you have many references, a sorting tool saves time, but it can only sort the text you give it, so check the order afterward.

Further reading

• APA Style: official site of the American Psychological Association