The reference list gets the attention, but markers meet your in-text citations first, and they meet them on every page. These are the rules of the 7th edition of the APA Publication Manual that are most often got wrong.
APA uses the author and the date. A citation is either parenthetical, with both in brackets, or narrative, with the name as part of your sentence and the year in brackets after it. Each one points to a full entry in the reference list, and that pairing is where marks go: upload the finished paper to EdCitation's Verify references, free, and each citation is matched to its entry.
| Authors | In brackets | In your sentence |
|---|---|---|
| One | (Aiken, 2014) | Aiken (2014) |
| Two | (Aiken & Sloane, 2014) | Aiken and Sloane (2014) |
| Three or more | (Aiken et al., 2014) | Aiken et al. (2014) |
| A group, the first time | (World Health Organization [WHO], 2020) | World Health Organization (WHO, 2020) |
| A group, after that | (WHO, 2020) | WHO (2020) |
The ampersand belongs inside brackets only. In your own sentence, always spell out "and". The American Psychological Association (2019) states both halves of that rule on its page for the author-date citation system, and the Publication Manual covers the whole system in Sections 8.10 to 8.36 (American Psychological Association, 2020). Every rule below was checked against the APA Style website in September 2026.
How many authors do I name in an APA 7 citation?
Name one or two authors every time, and for three or more give the first author and "et al." from the very first citation.
- One author: (Aiken, 2014)
- Two authors: name both, every time: (Aiken & Sloane, 2014), but "Aiken and Sloane (2014) found…"
- Three or more authors: the first author and "et al.", from the very first citation: (Aiken et al., 2014).
That last rule changed in the 7th edition. The 6th edition had you list up to five authors the first time. If you learned APA from an older guide, this is the habit to drop. There is more on the thresholds in the other styles in when to use et al..
"Et al." has a full stop after "al" and none after "et". It is never italic, and no comma comes between a single surname and it.
When two works shorten to the same et al. form
Write out as many surnames as it takes to tell the two apart, then abbreviate the rest. The American Psychological Association (n.d.) gives a pair of 2017 works that both begin with Kapoor and Bloom, cited as Kapoor, Bloom, Montez, et al. (2017) and Kapoor, Bloom, Zucker, et al. (2017). Note the comma after the last name written out.
There is a second half to that rule, and it is the half people miss. "Et al." means "and others", so it cannot stand for one person. If two works differ only in their final author, write every name in every citation: Hasan, Liang, Kahn, and Jones-Miller (2015) and Hasan, Liang, Kahn, and Weintraub (2015).
When two first authors share a surname
Add initials: J. Marsh (2019) and T. Marsh (2021), even in years that could not be confused. Suffixes work the other way. A name listed as "Fisher, R. A., Jr." is cited as Fisher (1935), with the suffix dropped.
Do I need a page number in an APA citation?
A direct quotation always needs a page number or another locator, and a paraphrase needs only the author and the year. APA allows a page number with a paraphrase, without requiring one, when it would save the reader hunting for the passage in something long, such as a book.
- One page: (Hall et al., 2016, p. 4)
- Several pages: (Hall et al., 2016, pp. 4–5), with an en dash between the numbers
- Pages that are not together: (Hall et al., 2016, pp. 4, 9), with a comma
- Pages with a prefix, as in some journals: p. S41, p. e221
In a narrative citation the locator goes after the quotation: Hall et al. (2016) called the result "unexpected" (p. 4).
Quotations from a source with no page numbers
Point the reader to the words some other way. APA accepts a section name, a paragraph number counted by hand, or both together, and says to shorten a long heading rather than reproduce it. For a video or a podcast, give the time the quoted words start: (Cuddy, 2012, 2:12). For an ebook, use the printed page number if the edition has one; APA tells you not to use Kindle location numbers. The locator appears in the text only: the entry is still for the whole work.
Block quotations of 40 words or more
A quotation of 40 words or more is set as a block: a new line, the whole block indented half an inch, double spaced, no quotation marks. The citation goes after the final full stop, and no full stop follows the closing bracket. In the narrative form, the author and year introduce the block and only the page number follows it.
How do I cite an organisation as the author?
Give the organisation's full name the first time, with its abbreviation in square brackets, and use the abbreviation after that.
- First citation: (World Health Organization [WHO], 2020)
- Later citations: (WHO, 2020)
In a sentence the first mention is World Health Organization (WHO, 2020). Define the abbreviation once only, in whichever form comes first, and use it for every mention after that. An abbreviation is a choice, not a requirement: a group cited without one, such as Stanford University, is written out every time. In the reference list, the full name is used, never the abbreviation.
When the organisation also published the work, the entry names it once, as the author, and leaves the publisher out. EdCitation's Cite a source builds it that way: the APA's own manual comes back as American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.), with no publisher after it, and the title in the sentence case APA asks for.
How do I cite a source with no author or no date?
Put the title where the author would go, and write "n.d." where the year would go.
- No date: (Needleman, n.d.)
- No author: move the title into the author's place, in title case. If the title is in italics in your reference list (a book, a report, a web page), it is in italics in the citation. If it is not (a journal article, a chapter), it goes in quotation marks: ("Nurse Staffing Levels," 2019).
- No author and no date: ("Nurse Staffing Levels," n.d.)
"Anonymous" is used only when the work is signed that way. A page on an organisation's website usually does have an author: the organisation. Every other combination, including a work with no title and one with no source at all, is in APA 7 with a missing author, date or page.
How do I cite several sources in one set of brackets?
Put them in alphabetical order, as they are in the reference list, separated by semicolons:
(Aiken et al., 2014; Kane et al., 2007; Needleman et al., 2011)
Not in order of date, and not in order of importance. Two or more works by the same authors are given by year, with the names written once, and the American Psychological Association (2022) sets the order of those years: no date first, then the dates in order, then anything in press. So (Department of Veterans Affairs, n.d., 2017a, 2017b, 2019) is correct, and so is Zhou (n.d., 2000, 2016, in press).
To put the most relevant source first, cite it, then add a semicolon and "see also" before the rest, which are themselves in alphabetical order: (Needleman et al., 2011; see also Aiken et al., 2014; Kane et al., 2007). Sources named in the run of your own sentence, rather than in brackets, may come in any order you like.
How do I cite two works by the same author in the same year?
Add a lower-case letter to the year: (Aiken et al., 2014a) and (Aiken et al., 2014b). The letters are assigned when the two entries are put in order in the reference list, which is alphabetical by title, and the same letters appear in the entries themselves. Use the year and letter alone in the text, even when the reference has a full date. With no date, the form is (Aiken, n.d.-a).
This catches anyone citing several undated pages from one organisation: five NHS pages become n.d.-a to n.d.-e, in the order their titles fall.
How often do I repeat the citation in the same paragraph?
In brackets, every time. APA does not use "ibid.", and a parenthetical citation always carries both the author and the year, however recently you gave them.
Narrative citations are the exception. Once you have named the work in a paragraph, the year may be left out of later narrative mentions in that paragraph, and is reintroduced in the next one. Two conditions apply: the context must make clear you are still on the same work, and the year stays every time if you cite more than one work by that author, so a reader can tell Mohammed and Mahfouz (2017) from Mohammed and Mahfouz (2019).
How do I cite a source I found in another source?
Name the original, then write "as cited in" and the source you actually read. If you read about Rabbitt's work in a paper by Lyon and did not read Rabbitt yourself, cite it as a secondary source, as in APA's example:
(Rabbitt, 1982, as cited in Lyon et al., 2014)
Only Lyon et al. goes in your reference list, because that is what you read. If the year of the original is not known, leave it out: (as cited in Nicholson, 2003). APA asks you to do this sparingly, keeping it for originals that are out of print, cannot be got hold of, or are written in a language you cannot read. A textbook that quotes a study is not a reason to cite the study second hand when the study is a search away. Put the study's title, or the claim the textbook credits to it, into EdCitation's Find sources, which searches about 300 million published works; if the original comes up, read it and cite it directly.
Which sources are cited in the text but not in the reference list?
Personal communications, and only those: an email, a text or direct message, an interview, a telephone call, an unrecorded lecture or webinar, a letter, a memo. None can be recovered by your reader, so each is cited in the text and nowhere else:
(J. Marker, personal communication, March 3, 2026)
Give the initials, surname and as exact a date as you can. Two things change that: material held in an archive is cited as archival material and does get an entry, and a live event that was recorded and posted afterwards is cited as the recording. People you interviewed for your own research are participants, not personal communications.
Everything else works in pairs, and each in-text citation must point to exactly one entry. A source listed and never cited, or cited and never listed, is one of the first things a marker checks. On Pro, EdCitation's Mechanics QA reads the file for exactly that, citations against the list, alongside its formatting, numbers and language, and reports what it finds without rewriting a word.
One caution about second opinions. The Purdue Online Writing Lab (n.d.) is the summary most courses link to, and on these points it follows APA exactly. Where a course handbook and APA differ, the handbook wins, because the handbook is what you are marked against. Handbooks usually differ on what APA leaves open: how much quotation is acceptable, and whether secondary citations are allowed at all.
What does a citation look like next to its reference?
Here is a passage with a narrative citation, a parenthetical citation and the entries they lead to. Both works are real, and so are the numbers.
Walters and Wilder (2023) had ChatGPT produce 84 short papers across 42 topics and examined the 636 references those papers contained. Of the references produced by GPT-3.5, 55% did not exist, against 18% of those produced by GPT-4. Summarising is unreliable in a quieter way: the summaries produced by ten well-known models were nearly five times as likely as human-written ones to state a finding more broadly than the paper did (Peters & Chin-Yee, 2025).
References
Peters, U., & Chin-Yee, B. (2025). Generalization bias in large language model summarization of scientific research. Royal Society Open Science, 12(4), Article 241776. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.241776
Walters, W. H., & Wilder, E. I. (2023). Fabrication and errors in the bibliographic citations generated by ChatGPT. Scientific Reports, 13, Article 14045. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-41032-5
Note what it does not do: no page number for a paraphrase, "and" in the sentence and "&" in the brackets, and one entry for each citation.
How can I get APA citations right without memorising the rules?
Build each reference from the source's own record, and have the pairing checked before you hand in. EdCitation is the best tool for both, because every reference it hands you comes from a lookup in the publisher's record; it never composes one. No chatbot can say the same: Walters and Wilder (2023) found that even among the ChatGPT references that did exist, 43% from GPT-3.5 and 24% from GPT-4 carried substantive errors, most often in the volume, issue, pages or year, which are the details a citation is built from.
| Step | EdCitation tool | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Build the entry, and so the surname and year you cite, from a DOI, title, PubMed ID or ISBN | Cite a source, which also screens for retraction | Free, no account |
| Track down the original behind an "as cited in" | Find sources | Free, no account |
| Confirm each reference is real and each citation has its entry | Verify references, with the whole paper uploaded | Free, no account |
| Check references and citations in a file, or its formatting, numbers and language | References from a file or Mechanics QA | Pro, $8 a month |
The Max plan, $24 a month, goes further with Theoretics QA and the Library. A generator that formats whatever it is given cannot tell you a reference is wrong; a lookup can. Cite a source sets a title in sentence case, as APA 7 asks, and keeps names and initialisms; glance at any name made of ordinary words before you trust the entry.
Quick questions
Do I use "et al." the first time I cite a source in APA 7?
Yes. In APA 7, a work with three or more authors is cited with the first author's surname and "et al." in every citation, including the first. Listing up to five authors the first time was the 6th edition's rule.
Is there a comma before "et al." in APA?
Not after a single name: (Aiken et al., 2014). When several names are written out to tell two works apart, a comma follows each name, including the last one before "et al.", as in APA's example Kapoor, Bloom, Montez, et al. (2017).
Do I need a page number when I paraphrase in APA 7?
No. A paraphrase needs only the author and the year. Adding a page or paragraph number is optional, and worth it when the passage would otherwise be hard to find, as in a long book.
How do I cite a quotation from a web page with no page numbers?
Give a section name, a paragraph number, or both, in place of the page: (Hall et al., 2016, Discussion section, para. 2). Count the paragraphs by hand if the page does not number them.
Does APA use "ibid." for a repeated citation?
No. APA Style does not use "ibid." A parenthetical citation repeats the author and year every time.
Where should the surname and year in my citation come from?
From the reference entry, and the entry from the source's record, not from memory or a chatbot's summary. EdCitation's Cite a source looks the work up by DOI, title, PubMed ID or ISBN, free, so the name and year in your brackets match what the publisher recorded.
References
- American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Citing works that shorten to the same "et al." form. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/basic-principles/same-year-first-author
- American Psychological Association. (2019). Author–date citation system. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/basic-principles/author-date
- American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000
- American Psychological Association. (2022, August). Citing multiple works. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/basic-principles/multiple-works
- Peters, U., & Chin-Yee, B. (2025). Generalization bias in large language model summarization of scientific research. Royal Society Open Science, 12(4), Article 241776. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.241776
- Purdue Online Writing Lab. (n.d.). In-text citations: Author/authors. Purdue University. https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/in_text_citations_author_authors.html
- Walters, W. H., & Wilder, E. I. (2023). Fabrication and errors in the bibliographic citations generated by ChatGPT. Scientific Reports, 13, Article 14045. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-41032-5