APA 7th edition
How to cite a book in APA 7th edition
Books look simple until you hit an edition number, a translator, or a publisher that has been bought three times — and the title page rarely matches the cover.
THE FORMAT
A book in APA, at a glance
Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the book: Subtitle in sentence case (2nd ed.). Publisher.
Halloran, J. (2019). The quiet architecture of scientific prose (2nd ed.). Ridgeline Academic Press.
(Halloran, 2019)
In prose: Halloran (2019) traces the modern lab report back to three postwar editorial decisions.
Marchetti, L. R., & Owusu, K. (Eds.). (2022). Rethinking peer review. Fenmore University Press.
In text: (Marchetti & Owusu, 2022)
Copyeditor formats APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE automatically — cite a source once and the references builds itself. See how citations work .
BEFORE YOU FORMAT
What APA needs from a book
Elements to collect
- Author or authors (or an editor, when there is no single author)
- Year of publication of the edition you actually read
- Full title, including any subtitle after the colon
- Edition number, when it is not the first
- Publisher name
- DOI or URL for an ebook that has one
Rules specific to this entry
- The whole title is italicized and set in sentence case, including the subtitle — capitalize the first word after the colon and nothing else that is not a proper noun.
- APA 7 gives no place of publication. Write the publisher name as it appears on the title page but drop business suffixes such as Inc., Co., Ltd., and Publishers.
- An edition number goes in parentheses after the title with no comma before it, and the sentence-ending period moves to after the closing parenthesis: (2nd ed.).
- When you quote, add the page to the in-text citation: (Halloran, 2019, p. 87). For an ebook without stable pages, cite the chapter or section heading instead.
Building the entry, step by step
Collect the details
Before you format anything, gather every element APA needs for a book: Author or authors (or an editor, when there is no single author); Year of publication of the edition you actually read; Full title, including any subtitle after the colon; Edition number, when it is not the first.
Build the references entry
Arrange those details in the APA order: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the book: Subtitle in sentence case (2nd ed.). Publisher.
Add the in-text citation
In the body of your paper, cite it as (Halloran, 2019) — or work the same reference into your sentence as Halloran (2019) traces the modern lab report back to three postwar editorial decisions..
Check it against the exceptions
The whole title is italicized and set in sentence case, including the subtitle — capitalize the first word after the colon and nothing else that is not a proper noun.
APA RULES
The conventions behind every APA entry
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.) is the authority. Where a journal or department publishes its own house rules, those win — check your submission guidelines before the references is final.
The rules that apply across every source — author order, capitalization, how the references is sorted, and where APA entries most often go wrong — are collected on the APA 7th edition guide.
The same book in another style
Switching styles late in a draft is normal. Here is the same source formatted five other ways.
Questions about APA and books
What if the book has no author?
Move the title into the author position and alphabetize by the first significant word of that title — ignoring an initial “A”, “An” or “The”. In the text, use a shortened form of the title where the author name would go.
What do I need before I can cite a book?
Author or authors (or an editor, when there is no single author), Year of publication of the edition you actually read, Full title, including any subtitle after the colon, and the rest of the elements listed above. Books look simple until you hit an edition number, a translator, or a publisher that has been bought three times — and the title page rarely matches the cover.
Is there anything unusual about a book in APA?
The whole title is italicized and set in sentence case, including the subtitle — capitalize the first word after the colon and nothing else that is not a proper noun.
What else catches people out here?
APA 7 gives no place of publication. Write the publisher name as it appears on the title page but drop business suffixes such as Inc., Co., Ltd., and Publishers.
Can I reformat this book in another style later?
By hand, you would retype the entry — the element order, punctuation and italics all differ between styles. In Copyeditor, sources are stored as structured data, so switching between APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE reformats every citation and the whole reference list at once.
Cite it once
and never reformat it again
Copyeditor keeps sources as structured data, so switching between APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE reformats every citation and the whole references at once.
