APA 7 citations in Markdown

Your department wants APA, 7th edition. You want to write in Markdown. Grasmere writes the in-text citations and the reference list in APA when you export, from sources you add by DOI, so the Markdown stays readable and the formatting is never yours to get wrong.

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What comes out

In the text, author and year with a comma, an ampersand for two authors and “et al.” from three:

(Field, 2019, p. 12)
(Field & Baker, 2019, pp. 12–14)
(Field et al., 2019)

In the reference list, headed References and sorted by author:

Field, R. (2019). The Living Loaf: A History of Sourdough (2nd ed.). Riverbank Press.

Field, R., & Baker, T. (2019). Wild Yeasts in Rye Starters. Food Microbiology, 12(3), 45–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fm.2019.01.002

Field, R. (2026, March 14). How Sourdough Rises. The Loaf. https://example.com/sourdough

The 7th edition’s rules are followed where they differ from the 6th: no place of publication for books, the DOI written as a link, the volume in italics, and up to twenty authors listed in full before an ellipsis.

How to set it

Add your sources. Project ▸ New Source with a DOI fills in a paper from Crossref, an ISBN fills in a book from Open Library, and Project ▸ Import Sources reads a BibTeX or CSL JSON export from Zotero.
Cite by typing [@ and choosing the source. Add a page if you want one.
When you export to PDF or Word, choose APA 7 under Citations. The choice is saved with the project, so it’s made once.

In the Markdown, a citation is a link to the source’s file, [Field 2019, p. 12](../research/The%20Living%20Loaf.md), which reads sensibly in any editor and needs no .bib file. There’s more in citations in Markdown without BibTeX.

Narrative citations

APA often has the author in the sentence: “Field (2019) found…”. Write the link with the author outside the parentheses in its text, [Field (2019, p. 12)](…), and it’s written that way.

The rest of an APA paper

Headings, a title page and double spacing are the export’s job, not the Markdown’s. A single document exports to Word with Word’s heading styles, which you can set to your department’s template. New in 1.6. A folder publishes through a LaTeX template of your own, which is the route for an apa7 class document. See using LaTeX with Markdown.

Questions

Which kinds of source does it handle?

Books, journal articles, chapters in edited books, reports and web pages, each in its APA form. Anything else is written from the fields it has.

What about two works by one author in the same year?

They’re told apart as 2019a and 2019b, in the text and in the list.

Is APA 6 available?

No. Only the 7th edition is written.

What if my journal uses something else?

Harvard, Chicago author-date and MLA 9 are the other styles. Numbered and footnote styles aren’t supported.

APA from a DOI.

Grasmere is a Mac app for long writing in plain Markdown files, with sources, citations, review and publishing built in. Try it free for 14 days.