How to Cite Multiple Authors in APA 7

To cite multiple authors in APA 7, the in-text rule depends on the count: name both authors every time for a two-author work, and use the first author followed by et al. for three or more authors, starting with the very first citation. The reference list follows a different count: list every author up to 20, and for 21 or more give the first 19, an ellipsis, then the final author. Those two rules answer most questions about how to cite multiple authors in APA, and this guide covers the rest: the punctuation of et al., the ampersand, what changed from APA 6, and the edge cases where et al. alone is ambiguous.

How to Cite Multiple Authors in APA 7: The Official Rule

Two sections of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed., 2020) control author formatting. Section 8.17 sets the in-text rule and Section 9.8 sets the reference list rule. They use different thresholds, which is the single biggest source of confusion on this topic.

In-text citations (Section 8.17):

Reference list entries (Section 9.8):

Three details in those tables trip people constantly:

• The ampersand belongs in parentheses and in the reference list. In a narrative citation, where the names are part of your sentence, write the word "and": Patel and Kim (2021) found. In a parenthetical citation, use the symbol: (Patel & Kim, 2021).
• Et al. starts at three authors, from the first citation onward. APA 6 made you list up to five authors the first time and shorten afterward. APA 7 dropped that. If your citations of a four-author paper list all four names anywhere, you are following a rule that was retired in 2019.
• The reference list never uses et al. for works with 20 or fewer authors. A seven-author paper gets all seven names in the reference. The shortening rules for in-text citations and reference entries are independent of each other.

The punctuation of et al. is fixed: no period after "et," a period after "al.," no italics, and no comma between the first author's surname and "et al." A comma follows only because the year comes next: (Torres et al., 2022). The phrase is short for et alii, "and others," which matters for one edge case covered below.

Worked Examples

1. Two Authors

Reference:

Strunk, W., Jr., & White, E. B. (2000). The elements of style (4th ed.). Longman.

Parenthetical: (Strunk & White, 2000)

Narrative: Strunk and White (2000) advise cutting needless words.

Both surnames appear every single time you cite the work. There is no shortening for two authors, no matter how often you cite them; "Strunk et al." is always wrong. Note the suffix handling in the reference: "Jr." follows the initials, set off by commas, and is omitted from the in-text citation.

2. Three Authors

Reference:

Torres, M. R., Okafor, C., & Lindqvist, S. (2022). Early intervention and reading outcomes in multilingual classrooms. Journal of Educational Psychology.

Parenthetical: (Torres et al., 2022)

Narrative: Torres et al. (2022) found the effect held across age groups.

This is the APA 7 change in action. The first citation is already "Torres et al." even though you have never named Okafor or Lindqvist in your paper. Their names live in the reference list, and the reference lists all three in full.

3. Five Authors

In-text: (Nakamura et al., 2020)

Reference: all five authors, in full:

Nakamura, H., Osei, K., Bergström, L., Duarte, P., & Whitfield, J. (2020). ...

Students often assume that because the in-text citation collapses to one name, the reference does too. It does not. From three authors up to 20, every name goes in the reference entry, in the order printed on the work, with an ampersand before the last one.

4. Twelve Authors

The pattern from example 3 stretches unchanged to 20 authors. A twelve-author reference lists twelve names separated by commas, ampersand before the twelfth. It looks long because it is long. Do not trim it, and do not replace the middle names with et al.; the reference list has no et al. rule until author 21.

In-text, nothing changes with scale: (Vasquez et al., 2023).

5. Twenty-One or More Authors

At 21 authors, Section 9.8 finally shortens the reference: the first 19 authors, then an ellipsis ( ... ), then the last author. The ellipsis replaces everyone from author 20 to the second-to-last author, and no ampersand precedes the final name.

Format:

Author, A. A., Author, B. B., Author, C. C., [authors 4 through 19], ... Lastauthor, Z. Z. (Year). Title of article. Journal Name, Volume(Issue), pages. DOI

The APA manual's own model for this rule is a real atmospheric science paper with dozens of contributors, cited as Pegion et al. (2019) in text: the reference names the first 19 researchers, an ellipsis stands in for the rest, and the final author, Kim, closes the list. Big-consortium papers in medicine, physics, and genomics hit this rule constantly.

In-text, the count changes nothing: (Pegion et al., 2019).

6. Group Author With an Abbreviation

Organizations are authors too, and APA 7 (Section 8.21) lets you abbreviate a long group name after introducing it once.

Reference:

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

First citation: (American Psychological Association [APA], 2020)

Later citations: (APA, 2020)

The abbreviation is introduced in square brackets inside parentheses, or in parentheses inside a narrative citation: the American Psychological Association (APA, 2020) recommends. The reference list always spells the name out in full and never includes the abbreviation on its own.

7. Chapter in a Book With Multiple Editors

When you cite a chapter from an edited collection, the chapter authors lead the reference and the editors appear mid-reference with "(Eds.)":

Osei, K., & Duarte, P. (2021). Assessment in practice. In L. Bergström, H. Nakamura, & J. Whitfield (Eds.), Handbook of classroom research (pp. 101-124). Academic Press.

In-text: (Osei & Duarte, 2021)

Two things to notice. The in-text citation names the chapter authors; the editors never appear in text. And the editors' initials come before their surnames in the reference, the reverse of the author position. That flip catches nearly everyone the first time. For the full element order, see our APA 7 book citation guide.

8. Citing Several Multi-Author Works Together

Multiple sources in one parenthetical citation are ordered alphabetically, matching your reference list, and separated by semicolons:

(Nakamura et al., 2020; Patel & Kim, 2021; Torres et al., 2022)

Alphabetical order is by first author's surname. Resist the urge to order them by year or by importance to your argument; Section 8.12 specifies reference list order.

Special Cases

Two Sources That Shorten to the Same et al. Form

Suppose you cite these two papers, both from 2020:

Jones, R., Smith, T., Liu, W., Chen, A., & Park, S. (2020). Jones, R., Smith, T., Ruiz, M., Chen, A., & Park, S. (2020).

Both would normally shorten to (Jones et al., 2020), and your reader could not tell them apart. Section 8.18 fixes this: spell out as many authors as needed to show the difference, then abbreviate the rest.

Citations: (Jones, Smith, Liu, et al., 2020) and (Jones, Smith, Ruiz, et al., 2020)

Here a comma does precede "et al.," because it follows a list of spelled-out names. This is the only situation where you will write more than one surname before et al. in APA 7.

When et al. Would Stand for Only One Author

Et al. means "and others," plural, so it must replace at least two names. If disambiguating under Section 8.18 leaves only one name to abbreviate, you cannot use et al. for it. Two four-author papers that differ only in their final author must be cited with all four names spelled out:

(Jones, Smith, Chen, & Liu, 2020) and (Jones, Smith, Chen, & Ruiz, 2020)

This rule is easy to violate by accident, and most citation tools silently get it right, which makes hand-written citations the place it surfaces.

Same First Author, Same Year, Same Co-Authors

If the same author team published twice in one year, disambiguating by names is impossible. APA assigns lowercase letters to the year instead (Section 8.19): (Torres et al., 2022a) and (Torres et al., 2022b). The letters follow the order of the entries in your reference list, which for same-year works is alphabetical by title.

First Authors With the Same Surname

When your reference list contains works whose first authors share a surname, include initials in every in-text citation to those works (Section 8.20): (E. Johnson, 2001) and (L. Johnson, 1998). This applies even when the years differ, and it applies only to the first author position; shared surnames deeper in the author list change nothing.

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

• Following an APA 6 template. Course shells and departmental templates circulate for years. If your template shows a first citation with three to five names spelled out, or a reference that shortens at eight authors with an ellipsis after six, it is APA 6. Threads on student forums regularly surface this exact problem, including professors distributing templates "formatted in APA 6, running headers and all." Follow the 7th edition unless the person grading the paper explicitly says otherwise, and when instructions conflict, ask, and keep the answer in writing.
• Misspelling or restyling et al. The correct form is "et al." with one period. "Et. al.," "et all," and italicized "et al." are all wrong in APA. Spell-checkers flag none of these reliably.
• Using et al. in the reference list. In APA the reference entry shortens only at 21 authors. Trimming a six-author reference to one name plus et al. is a habit imported from styles like Vancouver and MLA, and it costs marks in APA.
• Mixing up "and" and "&". The ampersand appears inside parentheses and in the reference list; the word "and" appears when the names are part of your running sentence. Writing (Patel and Kim, 2021) or "Patel & Kim argue" reverses the rule.
• Alphabetizing the authors of one work. Author order on a paper is meaningful and fixed. Copy the order from the source exactly; alphabetical order applies between entries in your reference list, never within one entry.
• Dropping the possessive awkwardly. For narrative possessives, the apostrophe attaches after the period: Torres et al.'s (2022) findings. It looks odd and it is correct.

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