APA 7th edition
How to cite a interview in APA 7th edition
Interviews you conducted yourself are usually personal communication — cited in the text but absent from the reference list — while published interviews are cited like any other recorded source.
THE FORMAT
A interview in APA, at a glance
Interviewer, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of the published interview [Interview]. Publication Name. https://example.org/interview
Sandoval, R. (2023, September 14). Nadia Erimo on the ethics of the archive [Interview]. Fieldnotes Magazine. https://fieldnotesmag.org/erimo-interview
(Sandoval, 2023)
In prose: Sandoval (2023) presses Erimo on who is served by a closed collection.
No reference-list entry — a personal communication is cited in the text only.
In text: (N. Erimo, personal communication, March 4, 2024)
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 interview
Elements to collect
- Name of the person interviewed
- Name of the interviewer, for a published interview
- Full date of the interview
- Where it was published or broadcast, when it was
- Format — transcript, audio recording, personal communication
Rules specific to this entry
- An interview you conducted yourself is a personal communication. It is cited in the text and never appears in the reference list, because the reader has no way to retrieve it.
- The personal-communication form carries initials, surname, and the exact date: (N. Erimo, personal communication, March 4, 2024). The date is what makes the citation checkable at all.
- A published interview is cited as whatever published it — a magazine article, a podcast episode, a video — with the author the outlet credits. Where the outlet credits the interviewer, as here, the interviewer takes the author slot; where it credits the interviewee, invert the two.
- Quotations from participants in your own study are data, not sources. Describe how they were gathered in the method section rather than citing them as personal communications.
Building the entry, step by step
Collect the details
Before you format anything, gather every element APA needs for a interview: Name of the person interviewed; Name of the interviewer, for a published interview; Full date of the interview; Where it was published or broadcast, when it was.
Build the references entry
Arrange those details in the APA order: Interviewer, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of the published interview [Interview]. Publication Name. https://example.org/interview
Add the in-text citation
In the body of your paper, cite it as (Sandoval, 2023) — or work the same reference into your sentence as Sandoval (2023) presses Erimo on who is served by a closed collection..
Check it against the exceptions
An interview you conducted yourself is a personal communication. It is cited in the text and never appears in the reference list, because the reader has no way to retrieve it.
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 interview in another style
Switching styles late in a draft is normal. Here is the same source formatted five other ways.
Questions about APA and interviews
What if the interview 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 interview?
Name of the person interviewed, Name of the interviewer, for a published interview, Full date of the interview, and the rest of the elements listed above. Interviews you conducted yourself are usually personal communication — cited in the text but absent from the reference list — while published interviews are cited like any other recorded source.
Is there anything unusual about a interview in APA?
An interview you conducted yourself is a personal communication. It is cited in the text and never appears in the reference list, because the reader has no way to retrieve it.
What else catches people out here?
The personal-communication form carries initials, surname, and the exact date: (N. Erimo, personal communication, March 4, 2024). The date is what makes the citation checkable at all.
Can I reformat this interview 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.
