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APA Citation Format Styles

Tutorials for creating APA citations

Disclaimer

The information on this page is meant to help you properly cite common forms of information resources. However, this page is not an exhaustive list, nor is it guaranteed to be accurate or in accordance with professor or publication expectations. For these purposes, it is always best to use the full citation manual for the appropriate style. Contact the Education and Research Services Department if you have questions about the examples given or if you would like to use the printed style manual.

A Word about Citing Artificial Intelligence

AI-powered language such as Chat-GBT or Bard are helping people create new content in new methods. 

AI chat tools, including ChatGPT, now include a sharing option that typically provides users with a unique URL and a title for each chat. This makes creating an APA Style reference for a specific chat a simple matter of following the author–date–title–source format used in most APA Style references.

Include a reference and in-text citation for a specific AI chat foremostly when doing so will be helpful for readers.

American Psychological Association has released some guidance:

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As of now, the reference and in-text citations for ChatGPT are formatted as follows:

AI Company Name. (year, month day). Title of chat in italics [Description, such as Generative AI chat]. Tool Name/Model. URL of the chat

  • Parenthetical citation: (AI Company Name, year)
  • Narrative citation: AI Company Name (year)

 

Examples: 

Anthropic. (2025, May 20). Essential grammar topics for high school graduates [Generative AI chat]. Claude Sonnet 4. https://claude.ai/share/329173b2-ec93-4663-ac68-4f65ea4f166d

Google. (2025, May 22). High school grammar concepts overview [Generative AI chat]. Gemini 2.5 Flash. https://g.co/gemini/share/a1306ce12929

OpenAI. (2025, August 21). High school grammar concepts [Generative AI chat]. ChatGPT. https://chatgpt.com/share/68a77b60-0ee4-800c-9acc-cd3fd573c311

Perplexity AI. (2025, May 20). High school grammar topics [Generative AI chat]. Perplexity. https://www.perplexity.ai/search/a457cb8c-c663-4c9b-b34e-cb03d8108b35

 

  • Parenthetical citations: (Anthropic, 2025; Google, 2025; OpenAI, 2025; Perplexity AI, 2025)
  • Narrative citations: Anthropic (2025), Google (2025), OpenAI (2025), and Perplexity AI (2025)

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Let’s break that reference down and look at the four elements (author, date, title, and source):

Author: The author of the model is OpenAI.

Date: The date is the year of the version you used. Following the template in Section 10.10, you need to include only the year, not the exact date. The version number provides the specific date information a reader might need.

Title: The name of the model is “ChatGPT,” so that serves as the title and is italicized in your reference, as shown in the template. Although OpenAI labels unique iterations (i.e., ChatGPT-3, ChatGPT-4), they are using “ChatGPT” as the general name of the model, with updates identified with version numbers.

The version number is included after the title in parentheses. The format for the version number in ChatGPT references includes the date because that is how OpenAI is labeling the versions. Different large language models or software might use different version numbering; use the version number in the format the author or publisher provides, which may be a numbering system (e.g., Version 2.0) or other methods.

Bracketed text is used in references for additional descriptions when they are needed to help a reader understand what’s being cited. References for a number of common sources, such as journal articles and books, do not include bracketed descriptions, but things outside of the typical peer-reviewed system often do. In the case of a reference for ChatGPT, provide the descriptor “Large language model” in square brackets. OpenAI describes ChatGPT-4 as a “large multimodal model,” so that description may be provided instead if you are using ChatGPT-4. Later versions and software or models from other companies may need different descriptions, based on how the publishers describe the model. The goal of the bracketed text is to briefly describe the kind of model to your reader.

Source: When the publisher name and the author name are the same, do not repeat the publisher name in the source element of the reference, and move directly to the URL. This is the case for ChatGPT. The URL for ChatGPT is https://chat.openai.com/chat. For other models or products for which you may create a reference, use the URL that links as directly as possible to the source (i.e., the page where you can access the model, not the publisher’s homepage).

You can learn more about citing Chat GBT and similar AI tools here:

https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/how-to-cite-chatgpt

Citing generative AI in APA Style: Part 1—Reference formats

Citing generative AI in APA Style: Part 2—AI as a search engine and AI integrated into common software

Citing generative AI in APA Style: Part 3—Is AI “allowed” in APA Style?