What is APA Citation Style?

APA (American Psychological Association) Citation Style is widely used for writing in the social and health sciences.

APA Citation Style uses dot "." as the field end sign and contains the following fields in the same order as listed below:

• Author, or authors, followed by year (and date if needed) of publication enclosed in parentheses "(...)". For each author, list the last name first followed by the first and middle initials. Use "&" to separate the last author for up to 20 authors, instead of ",". In case of 21 or more authors, list the first 19 authors followed by "...", and last author.
• Article title.
• Journal name, abbreviated and italicized, followed by volume and page numbers in ", issue(volume),page-page" format.
• DOI or URL, formatted as metadata and without the ending dot ".".

Examples for Print Journal:

Brown, J. D., Sintzel, J., St. Arnault, D., & George, N. (2009). Confidence to foster across cultures: Caregiver perspectives. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 18(6), 633-642. https://doi:10.1007/s10826-009-9264-z

Example for Web page:

Di Sario, F. (2024, July 31). Heat wave blanketing Olympics “impossible” without climate change. https://www.politico.eu/article/scorching-olympic-heat-impossible-without-climate-change-rising-temperature

For more details, see "APA Style" guide provided by Purdue University.

⇒ MLA Citation Style for Health Sciences

⇐ AMA Citation Style for Biomedical Sciences

⇑ Specifications of Citation Styles

⇑⇑ Citations for Research Papers