APA Citation Generator for Books
The generator below is preset to APA (APA 7th edition) for a book.
Check your reference against your institution's guidelines — lecturers sometimes vary the style.
Need a second pair of eyes on the whole assignment? RozContent’s Assignment Support checks referencing, proofreading and structure — first sample free.
Paste a URL, DOI, ISBN or title, or fill in the form yourself — the citation updates as you type, and you can copy it formatted, with italics and hanging indent intact, or as plain text. Under the tool you will find the APA rules for this source type, worked examples, and the mistakes students make most often.
The rules: APA format for books
Template: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of book in sentence case: Subtitle in sentence case (Edition). Publisher Name.
- The book title is italicised and written in sentence case — only the first word, the first word of the subtitle, and proper nouns are capitalised.
- Give the publisher’s name only. APA 7th edition does not include the publisher’s city or location.
- An edition other than the first goes in brackets straight after the title, and the brackets are not italicised: (3rd ed.).
- If the book has a DOI, add it after the publisher in the form https://doi.org/… with no full stop after it.
- In text: (Vasquez, 2021) or Vasquez (2021). Quote a page as (Vasquez, 2021, p. 74), and a range as pp. 74–76.
Examples
Vasquez, E. (2021). The architecture of memory: How the brain builds the past. Brightwood Academic Press.
Reed, M. T. (2020). Cognitive development in practice (3rd ed.). Harborview Publishing.
Gomez, L. F., & Hart, D. W. (2019). Statistics for the social sciences: A practical approach (2nd ed.). Beacon Academic.
Common mistakes
- Adding the publisher’s city (for example “New York, NY: Beacon Academic”) — that was APA 6th edition, not 7th.
- Capitalising every main word of the book title.
- Italicising the edition brackets, or hiding the edition in a note instead of after the title.
- Writing the authors’ first names out in full instead of initials.
Need this in MLA or Chicago instead? MLA version of this page · Chicago version of this page
Go deeper: read the guide how to cite a book in APA style.
From the RozContent Study Blog: read the matching study guide on the blog.