APSA Citation Generator

Create APSA citations for free. Paste a DOI, ISBN or link, or fill in the form, and get the reference list entry and the in-text citation formatted to APSA Style Manual (2018). No sign-up, nothing to install.

Style: APSA

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Reference List (0)

Your citations appear here, formatted in APSA. They are saved in this browser only: nothing is sent to us, and no account is needed.

    Paste and cite

    DOI, ISBN, PubMed, arXiv, YouTube or any web page. The details come from Crossref, Open Library, NCBI and the page itself.

    Nothing missing

    Every field your style needs is checked, and gaps are flagged in amber before they cost you marks.

    10,863 styles

    The official Citation Style Language files, the same ones Zotero and Mendeley use, plus a dedicated AGLC4 engine.

    APSA rules students get wrong

    APSA, APSA Style Manual (2018). Used in: Political science, and the journals of the American Political Science Association.

    • In-text citations give the author and year with no comma between them, and a comma before any page: (Jentleson 2015, 12-14).
    • Two or three authors are joined with "and"; four or more are cited as the first author and "et al.": (Angel et al. 1986).
    • Several works in one citation are separated by semicolons and put in alphabetical order.
    • The list is headed "Reference List"; only the first author's name is inverted.
    • Write a DOI as "doi: 10..." at the end of the entry.

    APSA examples for every source

    Each example below was formatted by this generator, so it is exactly what you will get.

    Journal article

    Reference List entry

    LeCun, Yann, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton. 2015. “Deep Learning.” Nature 521(7553): 436–44. doi:10.1038/nature14539.

    In-text citation

    (LeCun, Bengio, and Hinton 2015, 437)
    Book

    Reference List entry

    Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

    In-text citation

    (Kahneman 2011, 20)
    Chapter in an edited book

    Reference List entry

    Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. 1982. “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” In Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, eds. Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3–20.

    In-text citation

    (Tversky and Kahneman 1982, 4)
    Web page

    Reference List entry

    World Health Organization. 2023. “Depression.” World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/depression (September 28, 2026).

    In-text citation

    (World Health Organization 2023)
    YouTube video

    Reference List entry

    3Blue1Brown. 2017. But What Is a Neural Network? | Deep Learning Chapter 1. YouTube. Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk (September 28, 2026).

    In-text citation

    (3Blue1Brown 2017, 4:15)
    Podcast episode

    Reference List entry

    Glass, Ira. 2011. “Amusement Park.” This American Life. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/443/amusement-park.

    In-text citation

    (Glass 2011, 12:30)
    Lecture or speech

    Reference List entry

    Pausch, Randy. 2007. “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” Presented at the Journeys Lecture Series, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo.

    In-text citation

    (Pausch 2007, 10:05)
    Newspaper article

    Reference List entry

    Roose, Kevin. 2023. “A Conversation with Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html.

    In-text citation

    (Roose 2023)
    Magazine article

    Reference List entry

    Carr, Nicholas. 2008. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic 302(1): 56–63.

    In-text citation

    (Carr 2008, 57)
    Report

    Reference List entry

    World Health Organization. 2022. World Mental Health Report: Transforming Mental Health for All. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240049338.

    In-text citation

    (World Health Organization 2022)
    Thesis or dissertation

    Reference List entry

    Nash, John Forbes. 1950. “Non-Cooperative Games.” PhD thesis. Princeton University.

    In-text citation

    (Nash 1950)
    Conference paper

    Reference List entry

    Vaswani, Ashish, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. 2017. “Attention Is All You Need.” In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Curran Associates, 5998–6008.

    In-text citation

    (Vaswani et al. 2017)
    Dataset

    Reference List entry

    Fisher, R. A. 1988. “Iris.” doi:10.24432/C56C76.

    In-text citation

    (Fisher 1988)
    Film

    Reference List entry

    Inception. 2010. Warner Bros. Pictures.

    In-text citation

    (Inception 2010, 1:12:05)
    Software or app

    Reference List entry

    R Core Team. 2023. “R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing.” https://www.R-project.org/.

    In-text citation

    (R Core Team 2023)
    ChatGPT or other AI

    Reference List entry

    OpenAI. 2023. “ChatGPT.” https://chat.openai.com/chat.

    In-text citation

    (OpenAI 2023)
    Dictionary or encyclopedia entry

    Reference List entry

    Merriam-Webster. “Culture.” Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/culture (September 28, 2026).

    In-text citation

    (Merriam-Webster n.d.)
    Preprint (arXiv, SSRN, bioRxiv)

    Reference List entry

    Devlin, Jacob, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova. 2018. “BERT: Pre-Training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding.” doi:10.48550/arXiv.1810.04805.

    In-text citation

    (Devlin et al. 2018)
    Blog post

    Reference List entry

    Karpathy, Andrej. 2015. “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks.” Andrej Karpathy blog. https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/.

    In-text citation

    (Karpathy 2015)
    Court case

    Reference List entry

    Mabo v Queensland (No 2). 1992. 175 CLR 1 (HCA).

    In-text citation

    (Mabo v Queensland (No 2) 1992, 42)
    Legislation

    Reference List entry

    Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). 1988.

    In-text citation

    (Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) 1988, sec. 6)

    Other citation styles

    How to cite every kind of source

    Finished the paper? Check it.

    Paste your paper into the citation checker: every in-text citation is matched to your reference list, the style's rules are checked, and most mistakes fix in one click.

    Free APSA citation checker

    Quoting a video, lecture or podcast?

    Most styles want the exact words and the timestamp. Get the full transcript with timestamps, search it for the line you need, then cite it here.

    Free YouTube transcript generator

    Questions

    Which edition of APSA does this follow?

    APSA: APSA Style Manual (2018), formatted from the american-political-science-association style in the Citation Style Language repository. It is not yet checked against the examples in the APSA Style Manual, so check the final list against the manual.

    Who uses APSA?

    Political science, and the journals of the American Political Science Association.

    Is the APSA generator free?

    Yes. No account, no limit, and every export (Word, BibTeX, RIS, CSL-JSON) is included. Your list stays in your browser.

    Where do the details come from when I paste a DOI or link?

    DOIs come from Crossref and DataCite, ISBNs from Open Library and Google Books, PubMed IDs from NCBI, arXiv IDs from arXiv, YouTube links from YouTube, and web pages from the citation metadata the publisher embeds in the page (the same tags Google Scholar reads). Pages that carry no metadata are filled in as far as possible and the gaps are flagged for you.

    Can I export to Word, Zotero, EndNote or LaTeX?

    Yes. Copy the list with its italics into Word or Google Docs, download a formatted .docx, or export BibTeX for LaTeX, RIS for EndNote, Zotero and Mendeley, or CSL-JSON.

    How do I cite a quote from a video or lecture?

    Add the timestamp in the pinpoint box and paste the quote: the generator formats both for your style. To find the exact wording and the time it was said, get the full transcript of the video with timestamps first.

    Citations are formatted by citeproc-js by Frank Bennett (CPAL-1.0, or AGPL-1.0), the engine behind Zotero and Mendeley, running the official Citation Style Language styles (10,863 styles, commit 2e93558) and locales (commit a89adec), used under CC BY-SA 3.0. AGLC4 citations use the LexIntellect AGLC4 engine, checked against the Guide's worked examples. Always check a citation against the manual or your institution's guide before you submit.