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How to cite a book chapter in APA 7

A chapter in an edited book trips students up because the credit is split: the chapter authors open the reference, but the book’s editors appear mid-reference after “In”, and it is the book title — not the chapter title — that takes italics.

A worked example

Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi’s flow chapter from the Handbook of Positive Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2002) — a real, widely cited chapter.

Reference list entry

Nakamura, J., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2002). The concept of flow. In C. R. Snyder & S. J. Lopez (Eds.), Handbook of positive psychology (pp. 89–105). Oxford University Press.

In-text citation

(Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002)

Why it looks like this

You identified this as a book chapter.

Authors: Nakamura, J., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. — Two authors are joined with an ampersand — APA reserves "and" for running prose, not the reference list.
Title treatment: “The concept of flow” stays roman; “Handbook of positive psychology” takes the italics — A chapter lives inside an edited book, so APA keeps its title in roman, sentence-case type; the edited book is what gets the italics.
Date: (2002) — Scholarly, slow-cycle sources take the year alone — a full day-level date is reserved for fast-cycle sources like newspapers, magazines, and webpages.
Source line: “Handbook of positive psychology” is italicized as the edited book — The edited book is what carries the chapter — APA names it right after the title.
Retrieval link: (none on record) — Add a DOI or stable URL if this source has one, so a reader can retrieve it directly.

Easily confused with

book: If this were a book instead, the title itself would take the italics and there would be no separate container to name at all.
journal article: If this were a journal article instead, the source line would be labeled a journal rather than an edited book.

What Citeory checks on a book chapter

These are the checks the engine runs on this source type — a reference missing any of them is flagged before you paste it into a paper:

Missing author(s) — required for chapter sources.
Missing year — required for chapter sources.
Missing title — required for chapter sources.
Missing editor(s) — chapters cite the book’s editor as "In E. E. Editor (Ed.)" — required for chapter sources.
Missing journal/book/site/conference name — required for chapter sources.
Missing publisher — required for chapter sources.
Missing page range — required for chapter sources.

Citeory also verifies the source exists — records are checked against Crossref, DataCite, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar and PubMed, so a reference that cannot be found anywhere is flagged rather than formatted. The citation above was produced by that same rules engine, not written by hand and not generated by AI.

Format and check your book chapter citation →
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