APA 7 Referencing

Build correct APA 7th edition references and in-text citations in English. This is generic APA 7 with no institutional deviations. For the Swedish SHH variant, see the sibling skill swedish-apa-referencing.

Steps

1. Read references/apa7-quickref.md for the operative templates, then match the source type:

   • Journal: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of article. Journal Name, Volume(Issue), pages. https://doi.org/...
   • Book: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of work: Subtitle (2nd ed.). Publisher.
   • Chapter: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of chapter. In E. E. Editor (Ed.), Book title (pp. xx-xx). Publisher.
   • Web page: Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title. Site Name. URL

2. In-text: parenthetical (Author, Year) or (Author, Year, p. X); narrative Author (Year). Two authors: (Smith & Jones, 2024) in parentheses, Smith and Jones (2024) in narrative. Three or more authors: (Smith et al., 2024) from the first citation.

3. Apply the structural rules that generic tools get wrong:

   • Reference list: 1-20 authors listed, & before the last; 21+: first 19, ellipsis, final author
   • Sentence case for article and book titles; title case only for journal names
   • DOI always as a full https://doi.org/... link; no publisher location anywhere
   • n.d. when no date; group authors written out in full
   • pp. for page ranges in chapters and articles (pp. 707-745), p. for single pages

4. Secondary sources: cite only what you read. In-text: (Eriksson, 1984, as cited in Willman, 2022, p. 203). Reference list: only Willman (2022).

5. Quotations: under 40 words run inline with double quotation marks and (Author, Year, p. X) after; 40+ words as an indented block without quotation marks, citation after the final punctuation.

6. Verify: every in-text citation has a matching list entry (same lead author and year) and vice versa; alphabetical order; same author + year gets 2024a/2024b suffixes in both text and list; no fabricated or unverified references.

Pitfalls

• APA 7 dropped publisher location; do not add city.
• Retrieved from appears only when content changes over time and a retrieval date is needed.
• Volume is italic in journals, the issue number is not: Journal Name, 12(3), 45-60.
• The reference list contains only sources cited in text; never pad it.

Provenance

Clean-room summary of APA 7 (Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th ed.) conventions for agent use, authored 2026-09-03. Pairs with swedish-apa-referencing for institutional SHH deviations.