APA uses an author-date system — the author's last name and the publication year, either folded into your sentence or sitting in parentheses at the end of it. The format changes slightly depending on how many authors a source has, and the 7th edition changed one of those rules in a way that trips up a lot of people who learned APA under the older edition. Here's exactly how it works.
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APA in-text citations come in two forms. Parenthetical puts the author and year together at the end, outside the sentence's content: "...anxiety symptoms in teenagers (Parker, 2019)." Narrative pulls the author's name into the sentence itself and puts the year right after it in parentheses: "Parker (2019) found a correlation between social media usage and anxiety symptoms in teenagers." Both are correct APA — which one to use is a style choice based on whether you want the author's name to be part of your sentence's grammar or not.
For one author, it's just the last name and year: (Harris, 2020) or Harris (2020). For two authors, both names are cited every single time — use an ampersand in parenthetical citations, (Harris & Cook, 2020), and the word "and" in narrative ones, Harris and Cook (2020).
This is the biggest source of confusion for anyone who learned APA under the 6th edition. Under the old rule, you spelled out all the authors' names (up to five) the first time you cited a source, then switched to "et al." for every citation after that. The 7th edition removed that two-step process entirely: for any source with three or more authors, you use the first author's last name plus "et al." starting from the very first citation — (Parker et al., 2018), not (Parker, Robin, & Williams, 2018) the first time and then et al. later.
The two-author rule didn't change: you never abbreviate a two-author source to et al. — both names are cited in full every time, no matter how many times you reference it in the paper.
A page number (or paragraph number, timestamp, or section heading for sources without page numbers) is required whenever you're using a direct quote — the reader needs to be able to find the exact words. For a paraphrase, a locator isn't required by the rules, though APA notes it can still be helpful to include one in a long source so a reader can find the specific idea you're referencing without searching the whole thing.
A citation generator handles the mechanical part reliably once you tell it how many authors a source has and whether you're quoting or paraphrasing — getting the et al. cutoff right and the ampersand-vs-"and" formatting consistent across a whole paper is exactly the kind of repetitive detail that's easy to get right once and then forget to apply consistently by page 12. StudyPilot's citation generator formats APA in-text citations and reference-list entries together, alongside MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, and Vancouver.
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