APA 6th edition references and in-text citations from a DOI, ISBN, URL or title, with the rules explained. Export the list to Word.
Let’s cite!
Paste a DOI, ISBN, PubMed or arXiv ID, a web address, or just a title. Your list is saved in this browser, so you can close the tab and come back to it.
Formatted by citeproc-js © Frank Bennett, unmodified, under the CPAL — citeproc-js implements the Citation Style Language. Styles from the CSL project, CC BY-SA 3.0 (our copies).
Paste a DOI, an ISBN, a link or a title and the tool finds the publisher's own record for it and formats it in APA 6th edition — the author–date system used in journals and course guides that have not moved to the 7th edition. The references entry and the in-text citation come together, and the rules are those of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th edition (2010), published by the American Psychological Association. The 6th edition was published in 2009 and superseded by the 7th in October 2019.
Where a course guide was written before 2020 and says only APA, ask whether the 6th or 7th is meant; the publisher's city is the quickest way to tell which one an example follows.
Three steps, about twenty seconds a source.
A DOI, an ISBN, a PubMed or arXiv ID, a web address, or a title. APA 6 is already selected on this page. The tool works out what you pasted and asks the right catalogue — Crossref, OpenLibrary, PubMed, DataCite or Semantic Scholar — for the record.
Each source gets a card showing what the catalogue held and what the tool changed to fit APA 6: a title converted to sentence case, a DOI reduced to its bare form, a page range tidied. Every change can be undone with one click if the record was right as it was.
Copy the list with its formatting into Word or Google Docs, or download a .docx with the hanging indent and spacing already set. BibTeX, RIS and CSL-JSON exports carry the same data into Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote or LaTeX.
The rules the tool applies, from the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th edition (2010).
Six real sources — two journal articles, a book, a chapter, a web page and a conference paper — formatted by the same engine that runs the generator above. Nothing here was typed by hand, so what you see is what you get.
AI Writing Assistant. (n.d.). Free AI writing tools: What each does and when to use it. Retrieved September 18, 2026, from AI Writing Assistant website: https://www.aiwritingassistant.net/tools.html
In text: (AI Writing Assistant, n.d.)
Golder, S. A., & Macy, M. W. (2011). Diurnal and seasonal mood vary with work, sleep, and daylength across diverse cultures. Science, 333(6051), 1878–1881. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1202775
In text, citing page 1880: (Golder & Macy, 2011, p. 1880)
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Volume 3: Speech Acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press.
In text, citing page 45: (Grice, 1975, p. 45)
Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J. L., & Thaler, R. H. (1991). Anomalies: The endowment effect, loss aversion, and status quo bias. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5(1), 193–206. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.5.1.193
In text: (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1991)
Kuhn, T. S. (2012). The structure of scientific revolutions (4th ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
In text, citing page 12: (Kuhn, 2012, p. 12)
Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., … Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30, 5998–6008. Curran Associates.
In text: (Vaswani et al., 2017)
The publishers' records hold 6 of these titles in title case; the tool converted them to sentence case, as APA 6 requires, and reported each change on its card, where one click keeps the original instead.
Five errors markers see most often, and what the tool does about each.
The 7th edition dropped it, the 6th requires it: Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
In the 6th edition three to five authors are all named the first time and shortened only afterwards.
The 6th edition writes Retrieved from before a URL.
Eight or more authors are the first six, an ellipsis, and the last.
Unless a journal or course explicitly asks for the 6th edition, the 7th is what a reader expects today.
If your handbook names one of these instead, its page opens the generator with that style selected.
The 7th edition drops the city and Retrieved from, lists up to twenty authors and uses et al. from three authors. It is the edition to use unless told otherwise. Open the APA page.
Harvard shares APA 6's habit of naming the publisher's city, but uses and rather than the ampersand and gives an accessed date. Open the Harvard page.
Yes. Every style, every source type and every export is free, with no account and no daily allowance, because the formatting runs in your browser rather than on our servers. Your list is saved in this browser and never sent to us.
The 6th edition (2010). It is kept for the journals and course guides that still require it; the 7th edition is the default on the main Citation Generator page and has its own page.
The surname and year with a comma between them, and a page after another comma with p.: (Kuhn, 2012, p. The tool prints the in-text form under each reference; turn on the in-text switch above the list if it is hidden.
Paste the address and the tool reads the page's title, author, site name and date where the page declares them, then formats it. The APA 6 form of a web page with an organisation as author and no date is: AI Writing Assistant. (n.d.). Free AI writing tools: What each does and when to use it. Retrieved September 18, 2026, from AI Writing Assistant website: https://www.aiwritingassistant.net/tools.html Check the author and date on the card — pages often leave them out, and the style has a rule for each case.
Yes. Your sources are stored as data, not as formatted text, so choosing another style in the picker re-formats the whole list at once — APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver, or any of the 10,000 Citation Style Language styles the picker searches.
From the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th edition (2010), published by the American Psychological Association, as encoded in the open Citation Style Language style the tool uses. Where a course guide was written before 2020 and says only APA, ask whether the 6th or 7th is meant; the publisher's city is the quickest way to tell which one an example follows. Where your department's own guide differs on a detail, the department's guide is the one your marker reads.
Check the essay's grammar, tighten the wording, or summarise a source before you cite it. One plan covers every tool.
Each page opens the generator with that style already selected, shows what the tool prints for six real sources, and explains the style's rules. The picker above the list reaches more than 10,000 styles in all.
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