How to Cite a Preprint in APA

Paste the arXiv ID or link. If the paper has since been published in a journal, cite the published version instead. This page follows APA 7th edition, 7th edition (2020).

APA format for a preprint

APA 7th edition

References entry

Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2018). BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding (arXiv:1810.04805). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1810.04805

In-text citation

(Devlin et al., 2018)

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    Where to find the details

    • arXiv gives every paper a DOI of the form 10.48550/arXiv.ID.

    Required in most styles: author, date published, title, repository (arxiv, ssrn, medrxiv).

    Cite a preprint in another style

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    What do I need to cite a preprint in APA?

    At minimum: author, date published, title, repository (arxiv, ssrn, medrxiv). arXiv gives every paper a DOI of the form 10.48550/arXiv.ID.

    What does a preprint look like in APA?

    References entry: Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2018). BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding (arXiv:1810.04805). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1810.04805 In-text citation: (Devlin et al., 2018)

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    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.