APA 7 reference generator
In APA 7, in-text citations give (Author, Year) and the reference list is ordered A–Z by first author’s surname (American Psychological Association, 2020); this tool writes both. Paste DOIs or titles, one per line, or enter sources without a DOI by hand, then copy the list or download it as a Word file, RIS or BibTeX.
- Paste DOIs or titles, one per line, or enter a source by hand
- Read the warnings and fix anything missing with Edit
- Copy the list or download Word, RIS or BibTeX
How are Vietnamese author names written in APA 7?
APA gives the surname, then the initials of the middle and given names: Nguyen Thi Thu Ha becomes Nguyen, T. T. H., cited in text as (Nguyen, 2020). The Vietnamese surname already comes first, so nothing is reordered; only a comma is added after it.
When two different first authors share a surname (common with Nguyen, Tran and Le), APA adds their initials to every in-text citation: (T. T. H. Nguyen, 2020; V. A. Nguyen, 2021). The tool does this for you.
Some universities ask for Vietnamese names in full: Nguyen Thi Thu Ha (2020). Choose “Full name” under Vietnamese author names. If an English-language paper prints the name without diacritics (Nguyen, T. T. H.), keep it as printed.
- Paste DOIs or titles and click “Create citations”, or enter a source without a DOI manually.
Citing questionnaire scales: every scale in the scale library comes with its original source in APA style, and the Survey kit writes the measures section of your methods chapter together with its references.
Was this tool useful? Feedback / report a bug (by email; please do not paste real data).
How to use it
- Sources with a DOI: paste them into the “DOI or title” tab. Each line can be a DOI (10.2307/249008), a doi.org link, an article link that contains a DOI, or a title. You can paste an old reference list as it is: the tool pulls the DOI out of each line and searches Crossref by title when a line has none (Hendricks et al., 2020). DataCite DOIs from arXiv, Zenodo and OSF are resolved through doi.org.
- Sources without a DOI: use “Enter manually”. Pick the source type, fill in the fields that appear, check the live preview and click “Add to reference list”. A title Crossref cannot find, or a web link pasted in the first tab, gets an “Enter manually” button that opens the form pre-filled.
- Read the warnings (last page missing, no book editors, a reversed name corrected) and click Edit to complete the record. Titles found by search come with a drop-down of the nearest other matches: compare authors and year before you rely on them.
- Export. “Copy all” keeps italics and the 0.5-inch hanging indent when pasted into Word or Google Docs. “Download Word (.docx)” gives a ready References page in Times New Roman 12, double-spaced. RIS imports into Zotero, Mendeley and EndNote; BibTeX is for LaTeX.
Worked example
Paste 10.1111/isj.12131 and the tool returns:
Kock, N., & Hadaya, P. (2018). Minimum sample size estimation in PLS-SEM: The inverse square root and gamma-exponential methods. Information Systems Journal, 28(1), 227–261. https://doi.org/10.1111/isj.12131
In text: “(Kock & Hadaya, 2018)” or “Kock and Hadaya (2018) argue that…”. The paper appeared online in 2016 but was printed in volume 28 in 2018; APA uses the year of the issue, and so does the tool. Crossref stores the title in Title Case, so the tool converts it to sentence case while keeping the acronym PLS-SEM and capitalising the first word after the colon.
A Vietnamese legal document entered by hand is formatted like a report, with the issuing body as author:
Quốc hội. (2020). Luật Doanh nghiệp No. 59/2020/QH14. https://vbpl.vn/…
APA 7 patterns by source type
| Type | Pattern |
|---|---|
| Journal article | Author. (Year). Title. Journal, volume(issue), pages. DOI or URL |
| Book | Author. (Year). Title (2nd ed.). Publisher. |
| Edited book | Editor (Ed.). (Year). Title. Publisher. |
| Book chapter | Author. (Year). Chapter title. In A. B. Editor (Ed.), Book title (pp. 120–150). Publisher. |
| Conference paper | Author. (Year). Title. In Proceedings title (pp. 45–58). Publisher. |
| Unpublished thesis | Author. (Year). Title [Unpublished master’s thesis]. Institution. |
| Thesis online | Author. (Year). Title [Doctoral dissertation, Institution]. Repository. URL |
| Report | Organisation. (Year). Title (Report No. …). Publisher if different from the author. URL |
| Web page | Author. (Year, May 4). Title. Site name if different from the author. URL |
| Online news | Author. (Year, January 12). Title. News site. URL |
Undated sources take (n.d.). A web page that changes over time gets a retrieval date: “Retrieved May 4, 2025, from URL”.
Which APA 7 rules does the tool apply?
- Up to 20 authors listed in full; from 21, the first 19, an ellipsis, then the last author.
- Initials keep hyphens (Lang, A.-G.), suffixes (Jr.) and surname particles (van der Walt, del Río).
- Article and book titles in sentence case; journal names keep title case; journal name and volume in italics, issue not.
- Article numbers instead of pages appear as “Article 1021”; papers not yet in an issue as “Advance online publication”; editions as “(3rd ed.)”; chapters as “In … (Eds.), … (pp. 1–29)”.
- A group author that is also the publisher is not repeated as publisher; a website name identical to the author is dropped.
- Same authors, same year: 2021a, 2021b by title. When two different author groups would both shorten to “Kapoor et al., 2017”, more names are added until they differ.
- Group citations in one parenthesis are ordered A–Z and separated by semicolons: (Davis, 1989; Hair et al., 2019, 2021a).
- The list is ordered by first author’s surname, letter by letter across the whole author list, then by year (American Psychological Association, 2020).
- Duplicates (same DOI, or same title and year) are merged, and your hand-edited version is kept.
FAQ
How do I cite a direct quotation with a page number?
Add the page after the year: (Davis, 1989, p. 320), or pp. 320–321 for a range.
Why did the capitalisation of my title change?
APA 7 writes article and book titles in sentence case: only the first word, the first word after a colon and proper nouns are capitalised. Crossref often stores titles in Title Case. The tool keeps acronyms (PLS-SEM, COVID-19), country and place names and platform names, but it can lower-case a rare proper noun by mistake; untick “Sentence case for titles” to keep titles as stored.
How are Vietnamese author names handled?
APA treats the first name as the surname: Nguyễn Thị Thu Hà becomes Nguyễn, T. T. H. Crossref often stores Vietnamese names in Western order (family “Ha”, given “Nguyen Thu”); the tool detects this, corrects it and leaves a note so you can check. When two first authors share a surname, initials are added to the in-text citation, as APA requires.
Does the tool keep my list?
The list is stored only in your browser so it is still there when you return; “Clear list” removes it. Your browser sends DOIs or titles straight to Crossref and doi.org, not through our server, with no email or personal data. Manually entered sources are not sent anywhere.
References
- American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000
- Hendricks, G., Tkaczyk, D., Lin, J., & Feeney, P. (2020). Crossref: The sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(1), 414–427. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00022
- Kock, N., & Hadaya, P. (2018). Minimum sample size estimation in PLS-SEM: The inverse square root and gamma-exponential methods. Information Systems Journal, 28(1), 227–261. https://doi.org/10.1111/isj.12131
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