How-to · Research
How to cite a website in APA format (7th edition) in Chrome
The short answer
Open the CiteRoam side panel on the page (or press Alt+C), choose APA, and it builds the reference from the page's metadata — author, date, title, site name, URL — locally with Citation.js. Check the detected fields against the page, then copy the citation or save it to your private library. No account, and nothing about the page is uploaded.
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Open the CiteRoam side panel on the page you want to cite, or press Alt+C.
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Choose APA as the citation style.
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Check the detected fields — author, date, title, site name — against what the page actually shows.
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Apply APA's fallbacks where metadata is missing: organization or title first when there's no author, (n.d.) when there's no date.
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Copy the reference into your document, or save it to your private library for the final reference list.
APA's website format trips people up because every field has a fixed place and its own punctuation: author, date, page title, site name, URL — in that order. In Chrome you can generate the reference from the page you're actually reading in one click, then spend your attention on verifying the fields instead of assembling them by hand.
What an APA website citation looks like
APA 7th edition formats a web page as: Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of the page. Site Name. URL. The matching in-text citation is just the author and year, like (Chen, 2025). Getting the pattern right once is easy; getting it right forty times across a reference list, by hand, is where errors creep in.
Generate the reference in one click
On the page you want to cite, open the CiteRoam side panel or press Alt+C. It reads the page's metadata — byline, publish date, title, site name — and formats the APA reference locally with Citation.js. There is no form to fill in and no server involved: the citation is assembled in your browser.
Verify the fields before you copy
Web metadata is messy: bylines say "Staff", dates reflect the last redesign, titles carry the site's slogan. The citation card shows each field it detected, so read them against the visible page before you copy. A wrong author or date is much cheaper to catch here than in a submitted paper.
Apply APA's fallbacks for missing metadata
APA has explicit rules for imperfect pages. No individual author? Credit the organization, or if there is none, move the title into the author position. No date? Use (n.d.) in its place. Citing a page that is designed to change over time, like a wiki entry? Add a retrieval date before the URL. These cases are exactly where checking the detected fields pays off.
Keep the source in your library
Every citation you keep goes into a private reference library in your browser, with the source details attached, so your final works-cited list is a copy job rather than a reconstruction. You can also export BibTeX or RIS if your workflow runs through LaTeX or a reference manager.
Local-first by design
CiteRoam uses only the active tab you invoke it on plus local storage. There's no sign-in, and neither the page nor your library leaves the browser.