Common APA 7th Edition Citation Mistakes

After reviewing thousands of academic papers, certain APA citation errors appear again and again. Many of these mistakes are subtle—a missing comma, an ampersand in the wrong place—but they add up quickly and can cost points on a dissertation or manuscript review. Here are the most common ones and exactly how to correct them.

1. Incorrect Et Al. Usage

Under APA 7th edition rules, any work with three or more authors should use “et al.” starting from the very first citation. This is a change from APA 6th edition, which required listing all authors up to five on the first mention. Many writers still follow the old rule out of habit.

The exception is when two different sources with different authors would shorten to the same form. In that case, include enough authors to distinguish between them.

2. Ampersand (&) vs. “And”

APA requires an ampersand (&) inside parenthetical citations but the word “and” when authors appear in the narrative text of a sentence. This is one of the most common mix-ups.

The simple rule: if the citation is inside parentheses, use &. If the author names are part of your sentence, use “and.”

3. Missing Comma Before the Year

In parenthetical citations, a comma must separate the author name(s) from the year. This is easy to forget, especially when typing quickly.

4. Multiple Citations Not in Alphabetical Order

When citing multiple sources in a single parenthetical reference, they must be listed alphabetically by the first author’s last name and separated by semicolons.

5. Citations Without Matching References

Every source cited in the body of your paper must appear in the reference list, and every entry in the reference list must be cited in the paper. This one-to-one match is a fundamental APA requirement that is often violated when papers go through multiple revisions.

Cross-reference checking is tedious to do by hand, especially in a dissertation with hundreds of citations. This is one area where automated tools can save significant time and catch errors that manual review almost always misses.

6. Formatting Et Al. Incorrectly

“Et al.” has specific formatting requirements that are frequently broken:

• It should not be italicized (despite being Latin)
• There must be a period after “al” (it is an abbreviation of “alia”)
• There must be a space between “et” and “al.”
• There should be a comma before “et al.” only when it replaces more than one author following the first author

7. Year Suffixes Missing for Disambiguation

When two or more references share the same author(s) and year, lowercase letters must be appended to the year in both the in-text citations and the reference list entries (2023a, 2023b). These are assigned based on the alphabetical order of the titles.

How CiteLogos Helps

CiteLogos automatically detects all of the errors described above. It scans your Microsoft Word document, identifies each issue at its exact location, and places a comment explaining what’s wrong and how to fix it. No copy-pasting into a web tool, no separate report to cross-reference—the feedback appears right where you need it.