How to Cite a Book: APA, MLA, and Chicago Examples

The reading is done, the passage is flagged, and all that is left is the citation. Students lose more time on that last step than the step deserves: the city that used to sit in front of the publisher has vanished from current manuals, the copyright page shows two years, and half the templates online are still built on APA 6.

A book citation needs the author, the year, the title with its subtitle, the volume and edition where they apply, the publisher, and the DOI when the book has one. In your paper you add a short in-text citation or a footnote, in the order and punctuation your department's style prescribes.

By the end of this guide you have a copy-ready pattern for APA 7, MLA 9, and Chicago 18, you know which of the seven details your own style needs, and you can check a finished reference list in one pass instead of entry by entry.

📌 Key takeaways

• A book citation is built from seven pieces of information.
• The place of publication has all but disappeared from US styles.
• APA 7 lists up to 20 authors in the reference list.
• APA 7 wants a DOI whenever one exists, print or digital.
• The list is called References, Works Cited, or Bibliography.

What a book citation is made of

A complete book citation draws on seven details: author, year, title and subtitle, volume, edition, publisher, and place of publication. No current US style asks for all seven, but every style picks from the same list.

Every one of them is printed in the book, on two pages near the front. The title page carries the author, the title, the subtitle, and the publisher. The copyright page behind it carries the edition, the year, the publisher's city, and the ISBN. The dust jacket does not count as a source, because publishers shorten titles and drop names there.

The edition is the detail people skip most often. A new edition is printed when the last one sells out or when the text has been revised, and only the revised kind moves the page numbers. That is the whole reason the edition belongs in the citation: without it, your page 87 belongs to a different book.

Publication year, copyright year, or the year of the edition?

The year in your citation is the year of the edition you actually used. Copyright pages often print two years together, the year of first publication and the year of the current edition, and the second one is the one you need. For a straight reprint with no changes, the year of the underlying edition stays put.

Advice online often says to take the copyright year and never the year of the edition. Both are the same number only when nothing was revised. Every revised edition gets its own copyright year, and that is the year that matches your pagination. Take the year of first publication instead and a 2024 edition ends up dated 1998.

Where the place of publication went

The publisher's city has all but disappeared from US book citations. APA dropped it with the 7th edition, published in October 2019 with a 2020 copyright, moving from "Title of work. Location: Publisher" in APA 6 to "Title of work. Publisher Name. DOI (if available)" today. The Chicago Manual of Style did the same in its 18th edition of 2024 and states in its Citation Quick Guide that a place of publication is no longer required in book citations. MLA 9 keeps it only for works published before 1900.

Chicago keeps one exception of its own. For books published before 1900, the Quick Guide still gives the city in place of the publisher, as in its Melville entry, which closes with "New York, 1851". For anything printed in the twentieth century or later, the publisher stands alone and no city is added.

The reason is practical. A publisher's city once told a reader where a book could be obtained. Now that publishers distribute internationally and most titles exist in digital form as well, the field carries no real information, and the space at the end of the entry goes to the DOI instead.

Correct as of August 2026, subject to change.

One consequence catches people out in longer papers. A citation manager set up a few years ago may still be filling in the city, and the field does not clear itself when you switch the output style. Search your finished list once for a city followed by a colon and a publisher name, then delete what you find.

Book citation examples in APA, MLA, and Chicago

One example book runs through all three versions below: Anna Weber, "Doing Empirical Research: A Guide for Your Dissertation", third edition, published by Example Press in 2024, cited from page 87. No city appears in any of them.

Before the patterns, a warning worth the space. A citation style is a closed system, not a menu. APA and MLA put a short citation in parentheses in the running text, while the Chicago notes and bibliography system puts the details in a footnote. Combine them and you lose points even when every element is correct. Your syllabus or your department's writing guide says which one applies, and the groundwork is covered in our guide to citing correctly.

APA 7

APA is standard in psychology, education, nursing, and much of the social sciences. Purdue OWL gives the basic format as "Author, A. A. (Year of publication). Title of work: Capital letter also for subtitle. Publisher Name. DOI (if available)" on its page for APA reference list books. Only the first word of the title and the first word after the colon are capitalized.

References: Weber, A. (2024). Doing empirical research: A guide for your dissertation (3rd ed.). Example Press.

In the text: (Weber, 2024, p. 87)

MLA 9

MLA is the usual style in English, comparative literature, and the humanities. The author's name is written out in full, the title takes headline capitals, and the edition, publisher, and year follow in that order, separated by commas. Purdue OWL collects the variants on its page for MLA works cited books.

Works Cited: Weber, Anna. Doing Empirical Research: A Guide for Your Dissertation. 3rd ed., Example Press, 2024.

In the text: (Weber 87)

Chicago 18, notes and bibliography

Chicago runs two systems, and history, art history, and theology departments generally use the notes and bibliography version. The footnote gives the first name before the family name, and the bibliography entry turns the name around. The 18th edition of 2024 asks for no city, so the publisher and year sit alone in the parentheses. Purdue OWL keeps a summary of the 18th edition changes.

Footnote: Anna Weber, Doing Empirical Research: A Guide for Your Dissertation, 3rd ed. (Example Press, 2024), 87.

Bibliography: Weber, Anna. Doing Empirical Research: A Guide for Your Dissertation. 3rd ed. Example Press, 2024.

References, Works Cited, or Bibliography?

The list at the end of your paper carries a different name in each style, and the wrong heading is an easy point to lose. APA calls it References, MLA calls it Works Cited, and Chicago calls it Bibliography. Turabian, the student adaptation of Chicago, is in its 9th edition (as of August 2026) and follows Chicago here. The heading is not decoration: a reader who sees Works Cited expects MLA formatting underneath it.

Whole book, edited collection, or one chapter?

A chapter in an edited collection is not cited like a whole book. The chapter author comes first, then the chapter title, then the word In, then the editors, the book title, and the page range. Cite the smallest unit you actually read, and the rest follows from there.

Three things sit side by side on the shelf and get cited three different ways. A monograph is one continuous text by the same authors. An edited collection puts the editors in the author slot, marked (Ed.) or (Eds.) in APA. A chapter has its own author, its own title, and its own page range.

Purdue OWL gives the APA form as "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." Note the pp. in front of the page range, which APA uses for book chapters but not for journal articles. Where an edition number also applies, it goes in the same parentheses, separated by a comma, as in (2nd ed., pp. 66-72).

⚠️ Watch out

The chapter gets one entry in your list, and the collection it came from gets a second entry only when you also discuss the volume as a whole. Adding both by default pads the list with a source you never cited, which is easy for an instructor to spot and hard to defend.

E-books, PDFs, and the DOI

An e-book is cited like the printed book, with the DOI added if the book has one. The database you downloaded it from stays out of the citation, and no access date is needed, because a book does not change after publication.

A DOI is a permanent identifier that keeps pointing at a document even when the publisher moves the file. APA 7 wants it as a full link in the form https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-92529-5, with no DOI label and no "Retrieved from" in front of it. Purdue OWL is explicit that APA 7 requires a DOI for every work that has one, whether the copy in your hands is print or digital. If a print book has no DOI, nothing goes in its place, and the ISBN is not used in APA at all.

• PDF with the same pagination as print: cite it as the printed book, with no URL.
• E-book with no fixed pages: give the chapter or section instead of a page number.
• E-book from a library database with no DOI: the entry ends after the publisher.
• Book published openly online: add the publisher's URL after the publisher name.
• Digital pagination that differs from print: cite the version you actually read.

The last case deserves a second look, because it shows up in senior theses every year. Where the digital pagination differs from the print pagination, your citation is describing two different publications. Cite the one you had open, and keep the two apart within a single list. For material that exists only online, our guide to citing online sources covers the fields that print citations do not have.

Special cases: many authors, no author, no date, translations

Special cases run on one principle: whatever is missing gets replaced or labeled, never guessed. An estimated year in a citation is an error. An honest label is not.

Seven cases cover nearly everything an undergraduate paper runs into. The labels differ by style, so each one below names the style it belongs to.

• Two authors: APA joins the names with an ampersand in the reference list and with the word and in the running text.
• Three or more authors: APA 7 shortens the in-text citation to the first name plus et al. and lists up to 20 names in the reference list. APA 6 listed every author up to seven, and from eight onwards it gave the first six, an ellipsis and the final name.
• No author: where an organization published the book, APA puts it in the author position as a group author. Where nobody is identifiable, the APA entry begins with the title.
• No date: APA uses n.d. For undated online sources, Purdue OWL advises using "Accessed" with the date you consulted the source rather than the abbreviation "n.d.". That advice covers online sources, not printed books.
• Translation: APA puts the translator in parentheses after the title and closes the entry with the year of the original work.
• Volume in a series: APA puts the volume in the same parentheses as the edition, as in (8th ed., Vol. A).
• A thesis or dissertation as a source: in the United States a thesis is the master's document and a dissertation the doctoral one, which is the reverse of British usage, and APA names the awarding university and the repository.

💡 Tip

Where a detail is missing from the book itself, look the title up in the Library of Congress catalog. Publisher, edition, year, and place are recorded there for nearly everything published in the United States, and the record takes less time to check than an email to your instructor.

Common mistakes when citing books

Most points lost on book citations are not lost through ignorance. They are lost because a detail was copied off the wrong page or out of an old template. Four errors show up often enough to be worth one targeted pass.

All four take minutes to fix if you check the whole list at once rather than entry by entry. How strictly your instructor grades formatting is usually stated in the syllabus, and what happens when a source is missing altogether is covered in our article on the plagiarism check.

Copying details from the dust jacket

The jacket is a marketing surface. Publishers shorten titles there, cut subtitles, and sometimes print one editor's name instead of three. Copy that version and your entry matches no library record, which makes it awkward for a reader to verify. Take the title from the title page and the numbers from the copyright page.

Adding a city to an APA or Chicago entry

A publisher's city in a current APA or Chicago entry is a leftover from an older manual. Many guidance pages still show the APA 6 form years after 2019, and citation managers keep old output styles around long after you stop using them. One search for a city followed by a colon clears most of them out.

Carrying n.d. into a Works Cited list

For undated online sources, Purdue OWL advises using "Accessed" with the date you consulted the source rather than the abbreviation "n.d.". That guidance applies to online sources, not to printed books, and the same point already appeared in its list of changes for the 8th edition. Carrying n.d. across from an APA paper is a small error on its own, but it signals to a reader that the list was assembled out of two different styles.

Leaving out the edition

A missing edition number sends your reader to the wrong printing. Anyone who opens the first edition at your page number finds different text there. The edition sits on the copyright page, usually one line above the ISBN, and only a first edition goes unnamed.

Conclusion

Citing a book depends less on memorizing rules than on where the details came from: the title page and the copyright page, not the jacket and not an online store. Settle first on the style your department requires, then hold it across the whole list, heading included. The place of publication is the one field where current US manuals have genuinely changed, so old templates are the thing to check first. Your syllabus outranks any website, this one included.

Which style applies is not a matter of preference. The style guide your department publishes is the authority, and where it is silent your advisor decides. This article is a reference aid for the mechanics of a citation, not a substitute for academic advising, so check the local guidance before you submit.

What to read next

• Want the basics from the start? Citing correctly: the full guide
• Citing a website or a PDF? Citing online sources
• Working through a whole paper? Bachelor thesis: guide and structure

Missing your own data for your paper?

Numbers from a survey you ran yourself are not cited as an outside source, because you describe them in your methods section instead. With empirio.ai, an online survey tool from Germany, you can collect them at no cost. Our guide to creating a questionnaire shows how to design the survey first.

The pattern for a book reference changes with the citation style. Our guide to Harvard style citation shows the author-date version and the points where APA and Chicago author-date differ.

A book referenced in a footnote follows a different pattern. Our guide to the German citation style shows the full reference on first mention and the short reference after it.