How to Cite a Book Chapter in APA 7th Edition

To cite a book chapter in APA 7th edition, start with the chapter author and year, then the chapter title, then the book it sits in: the word "In," the editors, the italicized book title, the page range, and the publisher. That template applies to one situation only, a chapter in an edited book, where each chapter has its own author. If one author (or one team) wrote the whole book, APA tells you to reference the whole book and point to the chapter in your in-text citation. Most formatting errors with chapters trace back to mixing up those two situations, so this guide covers both, with the exact rule from Section 10.3 of the APA Publication Manual (7th ed.) and worked examples for the cases that trip people up.

The official rule for a chapter in an edited book

Section 10.3 of the Publication Manual gives this template for an edited book chapter:

Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Year). Title of chapter. In E. E. Editor & F. F. Editor (Eds.), Title of book: Subtitle also in italics (2nd ed., Vol. 3, pp. 121–140). Publisher. https://doi.org/xxxxx

Each element has its own rule:

• Chapter author comes first, surname then initials, exactly as authors are listed for any APA source. This is the name your in-text citation will use.
• Year is the copyright year of the book, in parentheses.
• Chapter title is set in sentence case and plain roman type. Capitalize the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns. No italics and no quotation marks. Writers coming from MLA reach for quotation marks here; APA never uses them for chapter titles.
• "In" introduces the book. It is capitalized and followed by the editors' names with initials before the surname: "In R. K. Mallett & M. J. Monteith (Eds.),". Editor names are the one place APA reverses its usual name order, and it is the single most common formatting slip in chapter references. Use "(Ed.)" for one editor and "(Eds.)" for two or more, followed by a comma.
• Book title is italicized and in sentence case.
• Edition, volume, and page range share one set of parentheses after the book title, in that order: (2nd ed., Vol. 3, pp. 121–140). Include only the parts that exist; a first-edition, single-volume book gets just (pp. 121–140). The page range covers the whole chapter, first page to last.
• Publisher follows, with no city or state. APA 7 dropped publisher locations entirely.
• DOI or URL goes last when the chapter or book has one, formatted as a link starting with https://doi.org/ and with no period after it.

In-text citations use the chapter author and year: (Rattan, 2019). For a direct quotation, add the page: (Lawrence & Dodds, 2003, p. 526). The editors never appear in your in-text citations. They live only in the reference entry.

Edited book or authored book? Decide before you format

Open the book's title page and check who wrote it.

An edited book lists an editor or editors on the cover or title page ("Edited by R. K. Mallett and M. J. Monteith") and credits a different author, or team of authors, at the head of each chapter. Each chapter you use gets its own reference entry under its own author, in the Section 10.3 format above. The University of Queensland library states the rule plainly: if there are different authors for each chapter, you reference each chapter you use.

An authored book was written straight through by the same person or team, chapter one to the end. APA has no chapter reference format for these. You reference the whole book, in the standard format from Section 10.2, and steer the reader to the chapter inside your in-text citation: (Kahneman, 2011, Chapter 3) or, for a quotation, the page number. Our guide to citing a book in APA 7 covers that whole-book format in detail.

The distinction carries the whole system. A chapter reference exists to credit the person who wrote those specific pages; when the book's author wrote every page, there is nobody separate to credit, so the whole-book entry already does the job.

Worked examples

1. Chapter in an edited book

The standard case: one chapter author, one editor.

Reference entry:

Matsumoto, D. (2009). Culture and emotional expression. In C. Spielberger (Ed.), Encyclopedia of applied psychology (pp. 535–539). Elsevier.

In-text citations:

• Parenthetical: (Matsumoto, 2009)
• Narrative: Matsumoto (2009) examined how cultural norms shape the display of emotions.

2. Chapter with two authors and two editors

Both chapter authors appear surname-first with an ampersand between them. Both editors appear initials-first, also joined by an ampersand, with "(Eds.)" after the second name.

Reference entry:

Lawrence, J. A., & Dodds, A. E. (2003). Goal-directed activities and life-span development. In J. Valsiner & K. Connolly (Eds.), Handbook of developmental psychology (pp. 517–533). Sage Publications.

In-text citations:

• Parenthetical: (Lawrence & Dodds, 2003)
• Narrative: Lawrence and Dodds (2003) traced how goals develop across the lifespan.

Note the switch between forms: the parenthetical citation uses "&," the narrative citation spells out "and" (Section 8.17).

3. Chapter with a DOI

Academic press chapters increasingly carry their own DOIs. Append the DOI after the publisher as a live link, and do not put a period after it.

Reference entry:

Rattan, A. (2019). How lay theories (or mindsets) shape the confrontation of prejudice. In R. K. Mallett & M. J. Monteith (Eds.), Confronting prejudice and discrimination: The science of changing minds and behaviors (pp. 121–140). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-814715-3.00008-4

In-text citations:

• Parenthetical: (Rattan, 2019)
• Narrative: Rattan (2019) reviewed how mindsets shape whether people confront prejudice.

4. Chapter in an edited collection in the humanities

The format is identical outside psychology. Literature, history, and philosophy chapters follow the same element order.

Reference entry:

Armstrong, D. (2019). Malory and character. In M. G. Leitch & C. J. Rushton (Eds.), A new companion to Malory (pp. 144–163). D. S. Brewer.

In-text citations:

• Parenthetical: (Armstrong, 2019)
• Narrative: Armstrong (2019) analyzed characterization across the Morte Darthur.

5. Chapter of an authored book

The trap case. Thinking, Fast and Slow has 38 chapters and one author, so no chapter reference exists for it. Reference the whole book once and carry the location in text.

Reference entry:

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

In-text citations:

• Parenthetical: (Kahneman, 2011, Chapter 3)
• Narrative: In Chapter 3, Kahneman (2011) connected self-control and cognitive effort.

If you quote directly, cite the page: (Kahneman, 2011, p. 41). Whatever you cite from the book, the reference list carries a single entry.

6. Entry in an online reference work with no page numbers

Reference-work entries and review chapters retrieved from databases often have no printed pagination. Omit the page range and close the book title with a period; if the work lives behind a database URL that readers can resolve, include it.

Reference entry:

Englehard, G. (2001). Review of the closed high school placement test. In B. S. Plake & J. C. Impara (Eds.), The fourteenth mental measurements yearbook. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mmt&AN=test.2083&site=ehost-live

In-text citations:

• Parenthetical: (Englehard, 2001)
• Narrative: Englehard (2001) has argued that the placement test's norms were outdated.

7. Republished or classic chapter

Anthologies often reprint essays first published decades earlier. Reference the anthology you actually read, and add the original year in parentheses at the very end. The example below is a pattern, with generic names standing in for your source:

Reference entry:

Author, A. A. (2010). Title of the reprinted essay. In E. E. Editor (Ed.), Title of the anthology (pp. 45–60). Publisher. (Original work published 1923)

In-text citations:

• Parenthetical: (Author, 1923/2010)
• Narrative: Author (1923/2010) first framed the problem this way.

Both years appear in every in-text citation, original first, separated by a slash. The reference entry itself has no period after the closing parenthesis of "(Original work published 1923)".

Special cases

The chapter authors are hard to find

In nursing, medicine, and other textbook-heavy fields, chapter contributors are easy to miss. The Wintec library guide notes that chapter authors' names may appear at the beginning of each chapter, in the table of contents, or in a separate list of contributors at the front of the book, and nowhere else. Check all three places before concluding the book has none. If the book genuinely credits no separate chapter authors, treat it as an authored book and cite it whole.

You used several chapters from the same edited book

Each chapter gets its own reference entry under its own author, even though the book title, editors, and publisher repeat. Three chapters means three entries, and each in-text citation names its own chapter author. Alphabetize them among your other references as usual; our guide to APA reference list order covers how repeated names and shared years sort.

One special wrinkle: if the same author wrote two chapters in the same year (in the same book or different ones), add lowercase letters to the years, 2019a and 2019b, assigned alphabetically by chapter title, and use those letters in text.

The chapter is an introduction, foreword, or critical essay

Front matter with a named author is cited like any other chapter: the introduction's author in the author position, "Introduction" or its actual title as the chapter title, then the editor and book as usual. A recent question on r/HomeworkHelp shows why this matters. A reader citing a modern edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses that also contains a scholarly essay by a different writer asked whether one entry could cover both. It cannot. The poem gets its own entry, with Ovid as author and the translator and editor credited in the source element. The essay gets a separate chapter-style entry under the essayist's name with the edition's publication year. Two things you cite, two entries.

The chapter has no author at all

If a chapter or entry truly credits no author and the book is edited, move the chapter title into the author position and keep the rest of the format, the same move APA uses for any source with no author. This is rare in practice; check the contributor list first.

The book has no date

Use (n.d.) in place of the year, in both the reference entry and the in-text citation: (Author, n.d.).

You found the chapter quoted in another source

If you read Smith's chapter only as quoted inside Jones's book, APA calls Smith a secondary source (Section 8.6). Reference the work you actually read (Jones), and name the original in text: (Smith, 1985, as cited in Jones, 2019). Track down the original chapter when you can; citing it directly is stronger.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

• Italicizing or quoting the chapter title. MLA puts chapter titles in quotation marks, so hands trained on MLA add them by reflex. In APA the chapter title is plain sentence-case text; only the book title takes italics.
• Reversing the editor's name. Authors are "Surname, F. M." but editors after "In" are "F. M. Surname". A reference that reads "In Mallett, R. K. (Ed.)" has the author rule applied where the editor rule belongs.
• Referencing the whole edited book when you used one chapter. A whole-book entry under the editors' names buries the person you actually read, and your in-text citation ends up crediting editors who did not write the words you cited. Cite the chapter author.
• Building a chapter entry for an authored book. There is no such format. Slotting the book's author into both the author and editor positions produces a reference no reader can parse. Whole-book entry, chapter number in text.
• Dropping "pp." or moving the page range. The chapter's page range belongs in parentheses immediately after the book title, with "pp." in front. A page range after the publisher, or bare numbers without "pp.," is the most common mangling our support inbox sees.
• Carrying over APA 6 habits. No publisher city, no "Retrieved from" before a DOI, and DOIs formatted as https://doi.org/ links. If your reference says "New York, NY:" before the publisher, it is following the 6th edition.

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