APA citation checker
APA Citation Checker
Paste an APA 7 reference list. Each reference is checked against Crossref in the order you pasted it. The general checker, for any style, is the citation checker.
- Journal submission
- Thesis
- Lab draft
Verified
Nature, 2013
Thermometry in a living cell
Mismatch
Science
1999
Nature
2013
Not found
10.1234/not-a-real-doi
Check this list
The file stays in this browser.
Paste APA, MLA, Chicago, BibTeX, or a numbered list — or drop your .bib file.
30 free. A paid report continues, up to 1,000.
The report will appear here
Pick a sample, or paste a list.
Sample input
Kucsko, G., Maurer, P. C., Yao, N. Y., Kubo, M., Noh, H. J., Lo, P. K., Park, H., & Lukin, M. D. (2013). Nanometre-scale thermometry in a living cell. Nature, 500(7460), 54–58. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12373 Walters, W. H., & Wilder, E. I. (2023). Fabrication and errors in the bibliographic citations generated by ChatGPT. Scientific Reports, 13, Article 14045. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-41032-5 Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, Ł., & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30, 5998–6008.
A list in another style belongs on the citation checker.
Frequently asked questions
Does APA 7 use et al. in the reference list?
No. Et al. starts in the text, at the first citation, when a work has three or more authors. The reference list spells the names, up to 20 of them.
Must the DOI include https://doi.org/?
APA 7 prints it that way. A bare DOI is the same number for the lookup. A reference with no DOI is still checked, by title.
Where is the checker for a list that is not APA?
Use the citation checker. It takes APA, MLA, Chicago, BibTeX, and a numbered list.
An APA 7 reference is a record, not a sentence
APA 7 puts the reference list at the end of the paper and the citation in the sentence. This page checks the list. It does not grade the sentence the citation sits in, and it does not rewrite either of them. Paste the references as they already stand. A line is read for the authors before the year, the year inside the parentheses, the title that follows, and a DOI if one is printed.
The useful pass is the last one, on the list you are about to send. A year copied from a preprint, a DOI that never resolved, and a title that belongs to a different article are all visible as rows. You correct the row. The page does not correct it for you.
Two authors are joined with an ampersand in the reference list. In the sentence they are joined with “and” when the names are outside the parentheses. The checker uses the list, so the ampersand is the form it expects. A narrative citation in the paragraph is not a substitute for the reference.
Where et al. starts, and how many names the list keeps
In APA 7, et al. is an in-text shortening, not a shortening of the reference list. For a work with three or more authors, the first in-text citation already uses the first author and et al. The reference list does not. It prints the names.
The list prints up to 20 authors. When a work has 21 or more, the list prints the first 19, then an ellipsis, then the final author. A checker that treated et al. in the list as the full author set would mark a real paper as a mismatch. This page does not. It takes the family name of the first author and asks whether that name is on the Crossref record. The remaining names are not required to match letter for letter, because initials and full given names differ on purpose.
If you paste a line that already says et al. in the reference position, the first family name is still the one that is compared. The abbreviated tail is not sent as a claim that the paper has a single author. Add the names back into the list when you want them checked. The page will not invent the missing names.
The year in parentheses, and the year in the sentence
APA 7 allows two placements. A parenthetical citation puts the year inside the parentheses: (Kucsko et al., 2013). A narrative citation puts the year in parentheses after the name in the sentence: Kucsko et al. (2013). The reference list uses only the first of those shapes. The year sits in parentheses immediately after the authors, before the title.
The checker reads that parenthetical year as the year you claim. It is compared with the issued year on the Crossref record. A preprint year that later became a journal year is the usual clash. The row shows both years. It does not decide which one your style requires. If the paper you cite is the preprint, the list should say so. If it is the version of record, the year should be the journal year.
A year that is missing from the list is left blank. A blank is not a pass, and it is not a failure. APA 7 would write n.d. for no date. This page does not treat the letters n.d. as a year to compare. The rest of the line can still be looked up by title.
The DOI prefix, and a reference that has none
APA 7 prints a DOI as a URL, with the https://doi.org/ prefix. An older draft may still print “doi:” and the bare number. Both are the same identifier. The lookup uses the number. The prefix is not a separate field, and a missing prefix is not a mismatch if the number resolves.
When the reference has no DOI, do not invent one to make the line look finished. APA 7 simply omits it. The check then uses the title, the first author, and the year as a search. The result shows the record that came back, including its DOI, so you can see whether the search landed on the paper you meant. A neighbor with a similar title is a mismatch you can reject. It is not a DOI for you to paste back in unless you have confirmed it.
A DOI that does not resolve is reported as no Crossref record. That can be a broken number, a number that was never registered, or a work Crossref does not hold. It is not, by itself, a finding that the reference was invented. Books and some reports are the usual honest misses.
Three APA 7 lines, as you would paste them
The box on this page accepts the three lines below as a list. The first is a journal article with eight authors and a DOI. The list names all eight. An in-text citation of the same work would already say Kucsko et al. The second is a two-author article. Two names stay in the list and in the first in-text citation. Et al. is not used. The third has no DOI. The title and the year are what the search can use.
Paste them in that order if you want to see the shape of a result before you paste your own list. The rows come back in the same order. Item two on the page is item two in the list.
Your own list does not have to be these papers. Any APA 7 reference with a year in parentheses can be pasted the same way. A hanging indent is ignored. A blank line between references is a split. A numbered list is not APA, and it belongs on the general citation checker rather than here.
What this page will not change
It will not move a year from the parentheses into the sentence, and it will not insert et al. for you. It will not add a DOI you did not have, and it will not delete a reference because Crossref missed it. Those are edits. This is a check.
A list in another style should not be forced through this page. MLA and Chicago arrange the year and the title differently. The general page for a list in the style you already used is the citation checker. Open that page when the list is mixed, or when it is BibTeX.
The file stays in the browser. Crossref receives a DOI, or a short query built from the title, the first author, and the year. The rest of the manuscript is not sent.