GUIDES · APA STYLE
APA in-text citations.
An APA in-text citation gives the author’s surname and the year, and points to the full entry in your reference list. This guide covers the APA 7th edition rules you will need most, with examples and a link to the official APA Style guidance for each.
Parenthetical and narrative
APA has two forms, and both carry the same information:
- Parenthetical: author and year in parentheses, separated by a comma, usually at the end of the sentence: Deep networks learn layered representations of data (LeCun et al., 2015).
- Narrative: the author is part of your sentence and the year follows in parentheses: LeCun et al. (2015) describe how deep networks learn layered representations of data.
Every work you cite in the text needs an entry in the reference list, and every entry needs at least one citation in the text. The one exception is personal communications, covered below.
Number of authors
APA 7 uses the same short form from the very first citation:
- One author: (Turing, 1950) or Turing (1950).
- Two authors: name both every time, with “&” in parentheses and “and” in your sentence: (Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, 1997) or Hochreiter and Schmidhuber (1997).
- Three or more authors: the first author’s surname and “et al.”, including the first citation: (LeCun et al., 2015) or LeCun et al. (2015). In the 6th edition, a work with three to five authors listed them all the first time; six or more were already “et al.” from the first citation.
If two works with three or more authors would shorten to the same “et al.” form and year, write out as many names as you need to tell them apart, then “et al.” for the rest: (Kapoor, Bloom, Montez, et al., 2017) and (Kapoor, Bloom, Zucker, et al., 2017). “Et al.” means “and others”, so it can’t stand for one person: if only the last author differs, write every name, as in (Hasan, Liang, Kahn, & Jones-Miller, 2015) and (Hasan, Liang, Kahn, & Weintraub, 2015).
Group authors
When an organization is the author, cite its full name. You may abbreviate it if the abbreviation is well known or saves repetition. Define it once, at the first citation, then use it on its own:
- First citation, parenthetical: (National Institute of Mental Health [NIMH], 2020)
- First citation, narrative: National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH, 2020)
- Later citations: (NIMH, 2020) or NIMH (2020)
The reference list entry always spells the name out in full.
No date or no author
When a work has no date, write “n.d.” in place of the year: (Author, n.d.) or Author (n.d.). For a web page, use its date of publication or last update, not the copyright year in the site’s footer.
When a work has no author, cite its title and year instead, in title case and shortened if it is long. Italicize the title if it is italic in your reference list, as a book or report title is; otherwise put it in double quotation marks, as for an article.
When one author has several works in the same year, add a lowercase letter after the year: (Blondaux & O’Hanrahan, 2018a) and (Blondaux & O’Hanrahan, 2018b). The letters follow the order of the works in your reference list, alphabetical by title, and the same year-and-letter appears in both places.
Several works at once
To cite several works in one set of parentheses, put them in alphabetical order, as they appear in the reference list, separated by semicolons:
- (Goodfellow et al., 2016; Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, 1997; LeCun et al., 2015)
For several works by the same author, give the name once and the years in order, separated by commas, with undated works first: (Department of Veterans Affairs, n.d., 2017a, 2017b, 2019). Works named in your sentence can appear in any order.
Quotations and page numbers
A direct quotation needs the author, the year and the exact location:
- One page: “p.”, as in (LeCun et al., 2015, p. 436).
- A page range: “pp.” with an en dash, as in (LeCun et al., 2015, pp. 436–437).
- No page numbers: give a paragraph number with “para.”, as in (Liu et al., 2020, para. 3), or “paras.” for a range.
In a narrative citation, the page goes in parentheses after the quotation: LeCun et al. (2015) write that deep learning “allows computational models that are composed of multiple processing layers to learn representations of data with multiple levels of abstraction” (p. 436). For a paraphrase, a page number is optional; add one when it would help a reader find the passage in a long or complex work.
Block quotations. A quotation of 40 words or more starts on a new line, is indented 0.5 in. from the left margin and has no quotation marks. Put the citation after the quotation’s final punctuation, with no full stop after the closing parenthesis. If you named the author and year in the sentence that introduces the quote, only the page goes in those parentheses.
Secondary sources and personal communications
A source you read about in another source. APA asks you to use secondary sources sparingly, for instance when the original is out of print or in a language you cannot read. Name the original, then “as cited in” the work you actually read: (Rabbitt, 1982, as cited in Lyon et al., 2014). Only the work you read, Lyon et al., goes in the reference list.
Emails, interviews, conversations. Readers cannot retrieve personal communications, so they appear in the text only and never in the reference list. Give the person’s initials and surname and as exact a date as you can: (T. Nguyen, personal communication, February 24, 2020) or T. Nguyen (personal communication, February 24, 2020).
Examples at a glance
| Situation | Parenthetical | Narrative |
|---|---|---|
| One author | (Turing, 1950) | Turing (1950) |
| Two authors | (Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, 1997) | Hochreiter and Schmidhuber (1997) |
| Three or more | (LeCun et al., 2015) | LeCun et al. (2015) |
| Group, first time | (National Institute of Mental Health [NIMH], 2020) | National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH, 2020) |
| Group, later | (NIMH, 2020) | NIMH (2020) |
| No date | (Author, n.d.) | Author (n.d.) |
| Same author and year | (Blondaux & O’Hanrahan, 2018a) | Blondaux and O’Hanrahan (2018a) |
| Several works | (Goodfellow et al., 2016; LeCun et al., 2015) | Goodfellow et al. (2016) and LeCun et al. (2015) |
| Quotation | (LeCun et al., 2015, p. 436) | LeCun et al. (2015) … (p. 436) |
| No page numbers | (Liu et al., 2020, para. 3) | Liu et al. (2020) … (para. 3) |
| Personal communication | (T. Nguyen, personal communication, February 24, 2020) | T. Nguyen (personal communication, February 24, 2020) |
Checked October 2026 against the APA Style pages linked above, which follow the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition. If your instructor or journal gives different instructions, follow theirs.
Get the citation from a DOI
Our free APA citation generator takes a DOI and gives you the APA 7 reference and its in-text citation, ready to copy. It runs in your browser and needs no account. Add the page number yourself when you quote.
If you are collecting many sources, Docr’d, which we make, is a research library that keeps your papers, notes and highlights together and copies citations in APA 7, MLA 9 and 12 more styles, or exports BibTeX and RIS. It is in early access.