Citeory › APA 7 guides › journal article

How to cite a journal article in APA 7

A journal article is the reference type everything else in APA is measured against: authors, year, article title in plain type, journal title and volume in italics, pages, and a DOI. Here is the pattern, a real worked example, and the reasoning behind each element.

A worked example

Watson and Crick’s 1953 Nature paper — a real article with a live DOI you can resolve.

Reference list entry

Watson, J. D., & Crick, F. H. C. (1953). Molecular structure of nucleic acids: A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid. Nature, 171, 737–738. https://doi.org/10.1038/171737a0

In-text citation

(Watson & Crick, 1953)

Why it looks like this

You identified this as a journal article.

Authors: Watson, J. D., & Crick, F. H. C. — Two authors are joined with an ampersand — APA reserves "and" for running prose, not the reference list.
Title treatment: “Molecular structure of nucleic acids: A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid” stays roman; “Nature” takes the italics — A journal article lives inside a journal, so APA keeps its title in roman, sentence-case type; the journal is what gets the italics.
Date: (1953) — Scholarly, slow-cycle sources take the year alone — a full day-level date is reserved for fast-cycle sources like newspapers, magazines, and webpages.
Source line: “Nature” is italicized as the journal — The journal is what carries the journal article — APA names it right after the title.
Retrieval link: https://doi.org/10.1038/171737a0 — A DOI never expires and never takes a trailing period, so the link can never be broken by punctuation.

Easily confused with

magazine article: If this were a magazine article instead, the date would need a full month (and day, if known), not just the year and the source line would be labeled a magazine rather than a journal.
book chapter: If this were a book chapter instead, the source line would be labeled an edited book rather than a journal.

What Citeory checks on a journal article

These are the checks the engine runs on this source type — a reference missing any of them is flagged before you paste it into a paper:

Missing author(s) — required for journal sources.
Missing year — required for journal sources.
Missing title — required for journal sources.
Missing journal/book/site/conference name — required for journal sources.
Missing volume — required for journal sources.
Missing page range — required for journal sources.

Citeory also verifies the source exists — records are checked against Crossref, DataCite, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar and PubMed, so a reference that cannot be found anywhere is flagged rather than formatted. The citation above was produced by that same rules engine, not written by hand and not generated by AI.

Format and check your journal article citation →
Paste a DOI, URL, or rough citation — the engine does the rest. No account needed to try it.