📚 NLM to APA Citation Converter
Convert National Library of Medicine citations to APA 7th Edition format instantly
| Number of Authors | NLM Format | APA 7th Format | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 author | Smith JA. | Smith, J. A. | APA adds periods after initials |
| 2 authors | Smith JA, Jones MB. | Smith, J. A., & Jones, M. B. | APA uses ampersand before last |
| 3–5 authors | Smith JA, Jones MB, Brown KL. | Smith, J. A., Jones, M. B., & Brown, K. L. | APA lists all, ampersand before last |
| 6–20 authors | First 6, then et al. | All authors listed | APA lists all up to 20 |
| 21+ authors | First 6, then et al. | First 19, ..., last author | APA uses ellipsis then final |
| Element | NLM Example | APA 7th Example |
|---|---|---|
| Full Citation | Smith JA, Jones MB. New findings in cardiology. N Engl J Med. 2023;388(4):312-320. | Smith, J. A., & Jones, M. B. (2023). New findings in cardiology. New England Journal of Medicine, 388(4), 312–320. |
| With DOI | ...388(4):312-320. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2023 | ...312–320. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2023 |
| No DOI, has URL | ...312-320. Available from: https://... | ...312–320. Retrieved from https://... |
| In Press | ...Forthcoming. | ...(in press). |
| Source Type | NLM Format Pattern | APA 7th Format Pattern |
|---|---|---|
| Whole Book | Author(s). Title. Edition. Location: Publisher; Year. | Author(s). (Year). Title (Edition ed.). Publisher. |
| Book Chapter | Author(s). Chapter title. In: Editor(s), editors. Book Title. Location: Publisher; Year. p. XX-XX. | Author(s). (Year). Chapter title. In Editor(s) (Eds.), Book Title (pp. XX–XX). Publisher. |
| Edited Book | Editor(s), editors. Title. Location: Publisher; Year. | Editor(s). (Eds.). (Year). Title. Publisher. |
| E-Book | ...Available from: URL | ...https://doi.org/xxx or URL |
| Source Type | APA 7th Format Pattern | Key Differences from NLM |
|---|---|---|
| Website | Author. (Year, Month Day). Title. Site Name. URL | APA includes retrieval date only if content changes |
| Dissertation | Author. (Year). Title [Doctoral dissertation, Institution]. Database. | NLM uses "dissertation" lowercase; APA brackets |
| Conference Paper | Author. (Year, Month). Title [Paper]. Conference Name, Location. | APA uses [Paper presentation] descriptor |
| Government Report | Agency. (Year). Title (Report No. XX). Publisher/Agency. URL | APA treats agency as author if no individual |
| Systematic Review | Same as journal article | No special formatting needed in APA or NLM |
Citaĭlo is a program that changes references from one style to another. For instance, it fits to convert quotes from APA-format to MLA-style or even from PMID-data to Excel-format. It helps a lot, because various professors and publications require different standards, and nobody would like to repeat everything by hand.
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Here are some free programs for quotes. Some of them create precise references automatically for books, newspapers, pages on the net and videos, quite a lot simply searching the name or code as URL or ISBN. So one types less and avoids many issues.
Easy tools to make and check citations
There is an app that allows you to cite any page or text part with one single tap in the browser. It grabs the title, author, date and all other needed parts to form an ideal quote.
Among the mainstream styles for quotes belongs APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian and Harvard. Some programs support thousands of variants, while others limit to the most used. There are special tools for IEEE-standards, that work for technical articles.
One creator can help with APA 6 and 7, MLA 7 and 8, the 17th edition of Chicago and Vancouver-rules. Besides that, another program recently added the 7th version of MLA for automatic list of used sources and bibliographic setup.
Part of those tools costs nothing, without ads, without need to download something and without need to register. Others created by expert writers avoid ads and give well formatted quotes according too the freshest editions of mainstream styles. Some of them show updates in real time and care about several authors or many references at once.
One of them even allows you to cite several books or pages together and include in-text references directly in the text.
Even so not every program is clean. Generators of quotes commonly err, and when one does not know whether to check manually, finding them is hard. Some require that you enter every detail, including letters of author names and full title, which can seem slow.
The quality of the results depends on the available data, and not always one receives safe automatic publishing.
Google Docs carry a built-in tool for quotes, that grew quietly over years. In Word there also exists a menu for references and bibliography on the tab of quotes, where one chooses styles as IEEE from a dropdown. Programs like Zotero work as full managers of bibliography, but there is a simple version of Zotero called ZoteroBib for fast single quotes.
One can enter a DOI-code or type it and choose a standard from a list to havethe quote right away.
Some tools also check the quotes against mistakes and errors by means of artificial intelligence or by means of human specialists. That extra layer of checking helps so that the references stay final and right.
