Common APA Citation Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

Citing in APA looks simple until you have to get it right. University libraries that review student papers document the same mistakes over and over — not because students don't know how to cite, but because the 7th edition has specific rules that no automatic generator can guess for you. This guide covers the most common mistakes and how to avoid them, so you know exactly what to double-check before you submit your paper.

Capitalization: sentence case vs. title case

APA 7 uses two different capitalization rules depending on what you're citing. The title of an article or a webpage goes in sentence case: only the first word (and proper nouns) are capitalized, like a normal sentence. The title of a journal, a book, or a website's name, on the other hand, goes in title case: every major word capitalized. Mixing the two up is one of the most common mistakes.

No generator — ours included — can guess the correct capitalization of your original source; that depends on how it's written there. What we do verify against the official style guide (apastyle.apa.org) is the structure: what's italicized, where the commas go, in what order — so that part never has to rely on memory.

"et al." from the first author with 3 or more (the real 7th-edition change)

If your source has 3 or more authors, the in-text citation uses "Last name et al." from the very first time you mention it — not starting at the sixth author, like the 6th edition required. It's one of the most important changes in APA 7, and one of the ones people most often keep getting wrong out of habit from the older edition.

The reference list, on the other hand, still lists every author up to 20 — the "et al." in an in-text citation and the full author list in the reference are two separate rules, not the same rule applied twice.

Volume, issue, and page numbers — the exact order

The correct format for a journal article is Journal Name, Volume(Issue), Pages — with the volume italicized, the issue number in parentheses with no italics and no space before the parenthesis, and the page range at the end. For example: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 15(1), 41-50. Reversing the order, adding a space before the parenthesis, or italicizing the issue number are all frequent mistakes.

If your article is online-only and doesn't have an issue number or page range, it's fine to leave them out — APA doesn't require inventing a detail the source doesn't have.

Thin-metadata sources: video, podcasts, social media

YouTube videos, podcasts, and social media posts often don't give you everything a full citation asks for — there isn't always a clear author, or the exact date is missing. Purdue OWL documents the official format for each of these cases: it's not that they "can't be cited," it's that the rule is different from a book or an article. This generator covers the most common source types with the format verified against that guide, instead of forcing the same template onto everything.

This is not the same as an AI-hallucinated citation

The distinction is worth making: a fixed-rules generator — like this one — can only give you an incorrectly formatted citation if you give it incorrect details; it can never invent an author, a title, or a source that doesn't exist. That's exactly what happens with AI chatbots: it's documented that tools like ChatGPT can produce citations that look perfectly real — author, title, journal, even a DOI — that simply don't exist, because the model predicts plausible-looking text instead of looking up real sources. It's one of the reasons this generator never uses AI to format anything: the same source, with the same rules, always produces the same verifiable result.

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