APA 7 Citation Guide: Examples for Every Reference Type

It is two in the morning, three days before the submission deadline, and a graduate student is staring at a reference list where every entry seems to follow a different logic: one DOI written as a bare code, another as a link, a publisher with a city, a publisher without one, an Arabic article title with no translation. Her supervisor has circled the whole page and written one word in the margin: APA 7. If that page looks familiar, this guide was written for you. It collects, in one place, the official APA 7 reference examples for every source type you will realistically cite in a thesis, the exact differences from APA 6, the in-text citation rules, and a 12-point checklist to run before you upload the final file. Last updated: October 22, 2026.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Why APA 7 dominates graduate writing in the social sciences

The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association is the standard citation style across psychology, education, and much of the social sciences — the fields in which most Arab graduate students write their theses. The reference-building rules live in sections 9.7 to 9.37 of the seventh edition manual, and the direct-quotation rules in sections 8.25 to 8.27; those section numbers are printed on the official APA Style pages, which themselves carry a revision date of October 2025, confirming the rules below are current for the 2026 academic year.

Everything in this guide is drawn from the official APA Style reference examples — not paraphrased from forums or secondhand campus handouts, which is exactly where most citation errors are born.

The four elements of every APA 7 reference

Every entry in your reference list answers the same four questions in the same order:

Once you internalize the four-element logic, the long examples table below stops being a list to memorize and becomes a formula to apply. A journal article, a YouTube video, and a government report all answer the same four questions — they just fill the slots differently.

APA 7 reference examples for every source type

The table below reproduces the official APA Style examples. The third column shows how each source appears in your text.

Two habits will save you hours. First, copy the pattern of the closest matching row rather than inventing a hybrid. Second, when two sources look equally close — say, a report on an institute's website versus a PDF report — pick the row whose retrieval reality matches yours: if you read a PDF with a publication number, follow the government report row.

In-text citations: narrative vs parenthetical

APA 7 gives you two legal ways to cite inside a sentence, and you should alternate between them for readable prose.

In a narrative citation, the author is part of your sentence and only the year sits in parentheses: Koehler (2016) found that practice improved steadily across sessions. In a parenthetical citation, both the author and the year sit inside the parentheses at the end of the claim: performance gains plateaued after ten sessions (Koehler, 2016).

The author-count rules are mechanical. With one or two authors, list every name every time. With three or more authors, use the first author's surname plus et al. from the very first citation — Grady et al. (2019), never a full five-name list. In the reference list itself, list up to 20 authors in full; for 21 or more, write the first 19, an ellipsis, then the final author with no ampersand before the last name.

For group authors with a recognized abbreviation, spell the name in full with the abbreviation in brackets at first mention — (National Institute of Mental Health [NIMH], 2020) — and use the short form afterwards: (NIMH, 2020). In the reference list, the full name always appears; abbreviations never migrate into the references.

Direct quotations always carry page numbers

Whenever you copy text word for word, the year alone is not enough: APA 7 requires a locator for every direct quotation. For a single page write p. 25; for a continuous range write pp. 34–36 with an en dash; for discontinuous pages write pp. 67, 72. For sources without page numbers — a long web page, a YouTube video — use the paragraph or section equivalent, or a heading name plus the paragraph number, so your reader can find the exact words. A quotation without a locator is one of the first things a careful examiner will catch.

Citing a source you read about secondhand: "as cited in"

Sometimes the original source is unavailable — an old book your library cannot obtain, cited inside a newer article you do have. APA 7 handles this with a secondary citation: name the original work with the phrase as cited in, then the source you actually read: (Rabbitt, 1982, as cited in Lyon et al., 2014). Only Lyon et al. (2014) — the source you hold — goes into your reference list. Rabbitt does not, because you never read it. Use secondary citations sparingly; whenever the original is obtainable, track it down and cite it directly.

Citing Arabic sources and translated works

Arab graduate students frequently cite Arabic-language studies, and APA 7 has an explicit rule for it. Keep the original title exactly as written, then add your English translation in square brackets immediately after it — the same pattern as the official translated-source example above. The entry below follows the official rule from APA's own guidance on citing your own translations: original title, bracketed translation, then the rest of the entry as usual.

When you translate a passage yourself and use it in an English thesis, that translated material counts as a paraphrase, not a quotation: no quotation marks, no page-number requirement beyond normal paraphrasing, because the wording is yours. If you quote a published English translation instead, treat it as a direct quotation of that published translation, locator included.

Narrative vs parenthetical citations at a glance

Sara from Amman reformatting her thesis references

Consider an illustrative example. Sara, a master's student in education at a university in Amman, finished her results chapter believing the thesis was done. Her supervisor returned it in one day with a single comment: the reference list does not follow APA 7. Sara had 74 references. Over two full days she rebuilt the list one entry at a time and found 38 distinct errors: 21 entries missing the hanging indent, 9 DOIs written in the old doi: style instead of the https://doi.org/ format, 6 book entries still carrying publisher cities that APA 7 removed, and 2 in-text citations whose matching reference entries simply did not exist.

Her recoverable mistake was doing all of this manually at the end, instead of formatting each reference correctly at the moment she first cited it. A free afternoon with the table above, applied entry by entry as you write, removes the two-day panic entirely. And if the prose itself needs a final polish — grammar, flow, sentence rhythm — a separate language editing service reviews up to 1,000 words for EUR 15 with 2-day delivery, without touching your content or voice.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

APA 6 vs APA 7: every difference that matters

Most Arab universities switched their thesis guides to APA 7, but thousands of older PDFs on the internet still teach APA 6 — which is why so many submitted theses mix the two. These are the documented differences:

The two errors examiners spot fastest are publisher cities (APA 6 leftover) and bare doi: codes — both take seconds to fix once you know they are errors.

Formatting the reference list page

The reference list has physical rules, not just content rules. The page is headed References in bold, centered. Every entry starts flush left, with subsequent lines indented half an inch — the hanging indent that Sara's 21 broken entries were missing. The list is double-spaced and ordered alphabetically by the first author's surname, numbered never. Entries by the same first author sort by year, oldest first. Margin widths and pagination follow your university's thesis guide where it overrides APA defaults — and this is precisely the formatting stage where most theses get sent back a second time. Formatting dozens of references to the letter — hanging indents, italics, name inversion, alphabetical order — is the single most error-prone step of thesis finalization, and it is exactly what Truescho's thesis formatting service takes over: EUR 39 for up to 40 pages and 30 references delivered in 3 days, or EUR 79 for up to 100 pages and 60 references in 5 days, with Word and PDF delivery and automatic indexes: https://truescho.com/en/apply-for-me/thesis-formatting

The 12-point checklist before you submit

1. Every source cited in the text appears in the reference list, and every reference entry is cited in the text — names and years match exactly.
2. Names are inverted (surname first, then initials) with a single space between initials.
3. Et al. is applied from three authors onward from the first citation.
4. Every DOI is written as https://doi.org/... — never the old doi: code.
5. Publisher locations are deleted from all book references.
6. Book, report, and webpage titles are italicized; article and chapter titles are not, and neither carries quotation marks.
7. Titles use sentence case — capitalize only the first word, the word after a colon, and proper nouns.
8. Every direct quotation carries a locator: p. 25, pp. 34–36, pp. 67, 72, or a paragraph/section equivalent.
9. A retrieval date appears only for designed-to-change content, in the form Retrieved Month Day, Year, from URL.
10. The list is alphabetical by first author's surname, double-spaced, with a 0.5-inch hanging indent under a bold, centered References heading.
11. Group authors appear in full in the reference list — never as abbreviations like NIMH.
12. Non-English sources keep the original title with your English translation in square brackets, and your own translations are treated as paraphrase.

Where citation style fits in your bigger application

References are only one document in the academic pipeline, and the same precision that fixes a reference list improves everything else you submit. If you are still designing your study, our master's research proposal template and PhD research proposal guides show where cited literature belongs in a proposal structure. For admission documents, the statement of purpose guide covers the essay itself, and Arabic-speaking writers drafting a research proposal in Arabic will find the research proposal writing guide maps the same structure onto Arabic academic conventions.

Frequently asked questions

What is APA 7th edition citation format?
APA 7 is an author-date system: in the text you write the author's surname and the year, and the full source details go into an alphabetized reference list with a 0.5-inch hanging indent. Works with three or more authors are cited as First author et al. from the first mention, and DOIs appear as https links rather than bare codes.

How do you cite a website in APA 7?
Give the author, date, italicized page title, site name, and URL. When an individual wrote the page, that person is the author — the Bologna HuffPost example; when an organization wrote it, the organization authors the entry, as in the National Institute of Mental Health example. Add a retrieval date only for designed-to-change pages like the Census clock.

How do you cite a journal article with DOI in APA 7?
Follow the official Grady et al. pattern: authors, year, article title in plain sentence case, journal name and volume italicized, issue and pages, then the DOI as https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000185. Never include the database name you used to find it. Articles published without page numbers use an article number, as in the PLoS ONE example with Article e0193972.

What is the difference between APA 6 and APA 7?
The headline changes: reference lists may carry up to 20 authors instead of 7; et al. starts at three authors instead of six; publisher locations are removed; DOIs are formatted as https links; e-books no longer mention platforms; and Retrieved from is dropped except for designed-to-change content. The full ten-row comparison table above covers every documented difference.

How many authors before et al. in APA 7?
Two dividing lines. In text, one or two authors are written out in full; three or more become First author et al. from the first citation. In the reference list, up to 20 authors are listed completely; for 21 or more, write the first 19 names, an ellipsis, and the final author — with no ampersand before the last name.

How do you cite a YouTube video in APA 7?
Treat the channel as the author, as in the official example: Asian Boss. (2020, June 5). World's leading vaccine expert fact-checks COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy: Stay curious #22 [Video]. YouTube. The bracketed [Video] descriptor goes right after the title, the site name follows, then the video's URL. In text, cite the channel name and year.

How do you cite an unpublished thesis in APA 7?
Use a bracketed description plus the institution, with no database name or publication number: Title [Master's thesis, Institution]. When the thesis came from ProQuest, add the Publication No. — the official Kabir example shows the doctoral form. The title is italicized, and the institution occupies the source slot.

Do you need publisher location in APA 7?
No. The seventh edition removed publisher location entirely — books now end with the publisher's name alone, as in the official Jackson example (American Psychological Association, no city). APA 6 required city and state, so any reference list still showing them was formatted under the old rules and needs updating.

Sources

• APA Style, elements of reference list entries: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/elements-of-reference-list-entries
• APA Style, journal article references: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/journal-article-references
• APA Style, book references: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/book-references
• APA Style, edited book chapter references: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/edited-book-chapter-references
• APA Style, webpage and website references: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/webpage-website-references
• APA Style, newspaper article references: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/newspaper-article-references
• APA Style, dictionary entry references: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/dictionary-entry-references
• APA Style, conference presentation references: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/conference-presentation-references
• APA Style, published dissertation references: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/published-dissertation-references
• APA Style, unpublished dissertation references: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/unpublished-dissertation-references
• APA Style, YouTube references: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/youtube-references
• APA Style, data set references: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/data-set-references
• APA Style, government report references: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/report-government-agency-references
• APA Style, citing your own translations: https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/cite-your-own-translations
• APA Style, direct quotations and page numbers: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/quotational-materials/direct-quotation-materials-with-page-numbers
• APA Style, official reference examples PDF: https://apastyle.apa.org/downloads/instructional-aids/reference-examples.pdf
• APA Style, creating a reference list PDF: https://apastyle.apa.org/downloads/instructional-aids/creating-reference-list.pdf

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Truescho's thesis formatting service applies APA 7 or your university's guide to your whole file — hanging indents, italics, alphabetical ordering, automatic indexes — from EUR 39, delivered in Word and PDF: https://truescho.com/en/apply-for-me/thesis-formatting