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Need an APA in-text citation? Our free generator builds both parenthetical and narrative APA 7 citations. Type the author and year, or generate the full reference and the in-text is included.
An APA in-text citation briefly points the reader to the full reference at the end of your paper. It usually contains the author's last name and the year of publication, and — for a direct quote — a page number. Get the in-text wrong and the reader can't trace your source; get it right and your paper is easy to verify.
The basic APA in-text citation is (Author, Year). For a direct quote, add a page number: (Author, Year, p. 23). Use "p." for a single page and "pp." for multiple pages.
A parenthetical citation places the author and year in parentheses at the end of the sentence: The results were significant (Smith, 2023). A narrative citation names the author in the sentence and puts only the year in parentheses: Smith (2023) found significant results.
Both forms point to the same full reference. Use parenthetical when the author is not the subject of the sentence; use narrative when you want to highlight the author.
Direct quotes in APA 7 require a page number. Short quotes (under 40 words) use quotation marks around the quoted text and a parenthetical citation with page number. Block quotes (40+ words) are indented, do not use quotation marks, and end with the citation after the final punctuation.
A paragraph that draws on one source repeatedly does not need a bracket after every sentence. Once you have named the author and year in a narrative citation, you may keep citing the year alone within the same paragraph as long as no other source intervenes and the attribution stays unambiguous.
Two other repeat cases have fixed forms. Two works by the same author in the same year take letter suffixes — (Smith, 2023a) and (Smith, 2023b) — assigned by alphabetical order of title in the reference list. Two different authors who share a surname take initials in the text: (J. Smith, 2023) and (R. Smith, 2021).
No. Page numbers are required only for direct quotes. For paraphrases and summaries, the author and year are enough.
Use the first author's last name followed by "et al." — for example, (Smith et al., 2023). APA 7 lets you use et al. from the very first citation, even with only 3 authors.
A parenthetical citation puts both elements in brackets — (Smith, 2023). A narrative citation names the author in your sentence and brackets only the year — Smith (2023) argues that…
Use n.d. in place of the year: (Smith, n.d.). Use the same form in the reference list so the two match.
Yes. In-text citations and full references are free, with no account required.