APA 7th edition
How to cite a patent in APA 7th edition
Patents use official patent office country codes, filing vs issue dates, and unique patent numbers.
THE FORMAT
A patent in APA, at a glance
Inventor, A. A. (Year). Title of invention (U.S. Patent No. x,xxx,xxx). U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. https://example.gov/patent
Vaswani, A., & Shazeer, N. (2020). Attention-based neural network architecture (U.S. Patent No. 10,945,678). U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. https://patents.google.com/patent/US10945678B2
(Vaswani & Shazeer, 2020)
In prose: Vaswani and Shazeer (2020) patented the attention mechanism.
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 patent
Elements to collect
- Inventor or inventors
- Year of patent issue
- Title of the invention
- Patent office (e.g., US Patent Office, European Patent Office)
- Patent number (e.g., U.S. Patent No. 10,945,678)
- URL or database source
Rules specific to this entry
- Include the patent office and number in parentheses after the title.
- The issuing patent authority takes the publisher position.
Building the entry, step by step
Collect the details
Before you format anything, gather every element APA needs for a patent: Inventor or inventors; Year of patent issue; Title of the invention; Patent office (e.g., US Patent Office, European Patent Office).
Build the references entry
Arrange those details in the APA order: Inventor, A. A. (Year). Title of invention (U.S. Patent No. x,xxx,xxx). U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. https://example.gov/patent
Add the in-text citation
In the body of your paper, cite it as (Vaswani & Shazeer, 2020) — or work the same reference into your sentence as Vaswani and Shazeer (2020) patented the attention mechanism..
Check it against the exceptions
Include the patent office and number in parentheses after the title.
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 patent in another style
Switching styles late in a draft is normal. Here is the same source formatted five other ways.
Questions about APA and patents
What if the patent 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 patent?
Inventor or inventors, Year of patent issue, Title of the invention, and the rest of the elements listed above. Patents use official patent office country codes, filing vs issue dates, and unique patent numbers.
Is there anything unusual about a patent in APA?
Include the patent office and number in parentheses after the title.
What else catches people out here?
The issuing patent authority takes the publisher position.
Can I reformat this patent 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.
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Copyeditor eliminates fragmented tab-switching by unifying structured drafting, multi-style citation generation, academic tone refinement, and cryptographic process verification in one workspace.
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