APA 7 Citations: How to Cite a Book, an Article and a Web Page

Every APA 7 reference is built from the same four slots: who wrote it, when it came out, what it is called, and where it lives. A book fills the fourth slot with a publisher, a journal article fills it with a journal name and a DOI, and a web page fills it with a site name and a URL. Learn the four slots once and the three formats stop being three separate things to memorise.

This guide covers the source types you will actually use in an undergraduate paper, with a reference-list entry and the matching in-text citation for each. If you are still deciding whether APA is the right style for your department, start with our comparison of how to choose a citation style and come back.

The four slots

Author, A. A. (Date). Title. Source.

Four elements, each closed with a period. APA 7 made two changes that trip up anyone working from an older template: the publisher's city is gone from book references, and "Retrieved from" is gone from URLs unless you are recording a retrieval date. If your reference list still says New York, NY: Routledge, you are writing APA 6.

Two formatting rules apply across all three types. Italics go on the title of the standalone thing (the book, the journal, the web page) and never on the title of a part inside it (the article, the chapter). Capitalisation is sentence case for titles of works: only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns.

A book

Bailey, S. (2011). Academic writing: A handbook for international students (3rd ed.). Routledge.

Slot by slot: surname, then initials with periods and spaces. Year in parentheses. Title in italics and sentence case, with the edition in parentheses after it, no italics and no period before the parenthesis. Publisher last. No city, no state, no "Ltd."

Here is the same book as it would have looked under APA 6, which is what most outdated templates and half the examples on the open web still produce.

Before (APA 6):

Bailey, S. (2011). Academic Writing: A Handbook for International Students (3rd ed.). London; New York: Routledge.

After (APA 7):

Bailey, S. (2011). Academic writing: A handbook for international students (3rd ed.). Routledge.

Three differences: title case became sentence case, the two cities disappeared, and the colon before the publisher went with them.

When an organisation both wrote and published the book, name it once and drop the publisher slot:

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association: The official guide to APA style (7th ed.).

For an edited chapter, the chapter goes in the title slot and the book moves into the source slot:

Switaj, E. (2015). Web writing and citation: The authority of communities. In J. Dougherty & T. O'Donnell (Eds.), Web writing: Why and how for liberal arts teaching and learning (pp. 223–232). University of Michigan Press.

Editor initials come before the surname here, the reverse of the author slot. It looks like an inconsistency and it is one, but it is the rule.

In text: (Bailey, 2011) or, narratively, Bailey (2011) argues that…. Quoting directly? Add the page: (Bailey, 2011, p. 47), or pp. 47–49 for a range.

A journal article

Klein, M., Van de Sompel, H., Sanderson, R., Shankar, H., Balakireva, L., Zhou, K., & Tobin, R. (2014). Scholarly context not found: One in five articles suffers from reference rot. PLOS ONE, 9(12), Article e115253. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253

The article title is plain text. The journal name and volume number are italic, the issue number in parentheses is not. Page range plain, en dash between the numbers. The DOI goes last as a full https://doi.org/… link, with no doi: prefix and no period after it.

Three details cause most of the lost marks here:

• List up to 20 authors. Twenty or fewer, write them all with an ampersand before the last. Twenty-one or more, write the first 19, then three spaced ellipsis points, then the final author.
• No DOI, no problem. If the article has no DOI and you read it in a library database, the reference simply ends after the page numbers. Do not paste a database URL with a session ID in it.
• Page numbers come from the printed article, not from your PDF reader's scroll position. When the two disagree, our guide to finding the page number for a citation from a PDF explains how to read the printed numbering off the page.

In text: with three or more authors, APA 7 uses "et al." from the very first citation: (Klein et al., 2014). The old "list all six the first time" rule is gone.

A web page

The pattern, with the parts you will be swapping in marked:

Organisation or Author. (2024, March 12). Title of the page in sentence case. Site Name. https://example.org/the-page

Four things to watch.

Corporate author. When no person is named, the organisation goes in the author slot. If the organisation is also the site, drop the site name rather than repeating it. In text that reads (World Health Organization, 2024) on first use, then the abbreviation if you introduced one: (WHO, 2024).

Full date when the page carries one, written (2024, March 12), month spelled out.

No date? Use (n.d.), and treat it as a warning sign about the source rather than a formatting inconvenience.

Retrieval date only when the content is designed to change and has no archived version: a live statistics dashboard, a wiki entry, a currency converter. Then, and only then, write Retrieved August 23, 2026, from https://…. A static PDF of a 2019 report needs no retrieval date.

That last rule looks fussy until you see the decay numbers. Klein et al. (2014) found that a large share of references to general web resources could no longer be revisited some time after they were cited, and made the sharper point that a link which still resolves may quietly serve content different from what the author saw, which is harder to detect than an unambiguous "404 Not Found" (p. 26). Sampling articles in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Coble and Karlin (2023) found that on average only about 69% of the links in those articles still worked. The site name and the full date are what let a reader find the page in a web archive after its URL dies.

Why the marker cares

Getting the slots right is not cosmetic. Subramanian et al. (2025) note that bibliographic errors such as incorrect author names, titles and publication details undermine the credibility of the work they appear in, and that citation problems are a contributing factor in an estimated 10 to 15 per cent of manuscript rejections (p. 100). A reference list is the fastest part of a paper for a reader to spot-check, which is why errors there are expensive relative to how small they look.

Formatting is the easy half

Reference managers handle the four slots well. What the classic ones were never built to do is check whether the source exists at all. Jin et al. (2026) point out that market-leading tools were designed to organise, store and format references rather than verify their authenticity, so a fabricated entry sails straight through a bibliography generator (p. 5). That gap matters now that many first drafts pass through a chatbot on the way to the page.

Two practical steps. Use a bibliography generator to lay out the four slots correctly, then check the metadata it produces against the source itself, because a generator will faithfully format whatever you feed it, typo in the author's name included. If an entry came from an AI assistant rather than from a database or the PDF in front of you, confirm the record exists before it reaches your reference list. That is what our citation generator builds from: real catalogue records rather than plausible-looking strings.

One note on method: the four academic sources cited above were found with cytado, and the page numbers are the printed ones from those articles.