A YouTube video is a perfectly citable source, and APA 7 has a clear format for it. This page gives the format, the four rules people most often get wrong, worked examples, and how to cite a direct quote by its timestamp. The rules here are taken from the APA Style website, checked in November 2026.
The format
Channel Name. (Year, Month Day). Title of video [Video]. YouTube. URL
Five parts, in this order:
- Author: the name of the account that uploaded the video.
- Date: the upload date, year first, then month and day.
- Title: in italics and in sentence case, followed by the description [Video] in square brackets.
- Site name: YouTube.
- URL: the link to the video.
The rules people get wrong
The channel is the author
APA says to use the name of the account that uploaded the video as the author. A lecture by a professor on a university's channel is cited under the university. You still name the speaker: APA's advice for words spoken by people in a video is to name or describe them in your sentence, then give the parenthetical citation for the video.
The title goes in sentence case
Many YouTube titles are in title case or capitals. APA uses sentence case for the titles of works in a reference list, even when the original used title case. Capitalise the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns; lower-case the rest.
The title is italic
The video is a stand-alone work, so its title is italicised, like a book. The description [Video] is not.
[Video] goes after the title
The description in square brackets tells the reader what kind of source this is. For a channel rather than a single video, APA uses [YouTube channel] instead.
Examples
APA's own example, from its YouTube references page:
Harvard University. (2019, August 28). Soft robotic gripper for jellyfish [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guRoWTYfxMs
The first lecture of Michael Sandel's Justice course, uploaded by Harvard University:
Harvard University. (2009, September 4). Justice: What's the right thing to do? Episode 01 [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/kBdfcR-8hEY
Sentence case in practice. A later lecture in the same course appears on YouTube as Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do? Episode 03: "FREE TO CHOOSE". In the reference list that becomes Justice: What's the right thing to do? Episode 03: "Free to choose": the first word, the first word after each colon and the first word after the question mark keep their capital, and the rest go lower case.
With no upload date available, use n.d.:
Channel Name. (n.d.). Title of video [Video]. YouTube. URL
In-text citations
In the text, give the author and year, either in parentheses or as part of the sentence:
- Parenthetical: (Harvard University, 2009)
- Narrative: Harvard University (2009)
Quoting with a timestamp
A video has no page numbers. For a direct quotation from an audiovisual work, APA says to provide a time stamp for the beginning of the quotation in place of a page number. APA's own example is (Cuddy, 2012, 2:12). Applied to the Justice lecture:
Sandel opens the course by announcing that “this is a course about justice and we begin with a story” (Harvard University, 2009, 0:04).
The time stamp is what lets a reader, or you a month later, find the line. It is worth noting for every quote as you take it, rather than scrubbing back through an hour of video at the end.
Citing the transcript instead of the video
If what you actually read was a published transcript, APA cites it like the original work with a bracketed description such as [Speech transcript], and the transcript's URL. If you watched the video and used a transcript only to find the words, cite the video.
How INDXR builds the citation for you
Every YouTube transcript in your INDXR library shows a ready APA 7 reference with a copy button. This is exactly what it puts together:
- Author: the channel name. If the channel is unknown, it says “Unknown channel”, which you should replace.
- Date: the upload date, looked up on YouTube the first time you open the transcript, written as (2009, September 4). When YouTube has none, it writes (n.d.).
- Title: the title exactly as YouTube shows it, followed by [Video].
- Site and link: YouTube, then a short youtu.be link to the video.
Two things you finish by hand. The title is copied verbatim, so a title-case or all-caps title needs changing to sentence case. And the citation is copied as plain text, which cannot carry italics, so italicise the title in your document.
For a recording you uploaded yourself, there is no channel or upload date to read, so the reference reads Title [Audio recording]. (n.d.). Add the speaker or author and the recording date before you use it.
The same citation comes through when you connect your library to Claude or ChatGPT: the assistant can look up each source and add its reference to notes or a draft. See using Claude or ChatGPT with your own sources. The quotes it gives you carry timestamps, which is the part APA asks for in the text.
A quick checklist
- Author is the uploading channel, spelled as it appears.
- Date is the upload date, or n.d.
- Title in sentence case and italics, then [Video].
- YouTube, then the URL.
- Each direct quote has a time stamp in the in-text citation.
A free INDXR account includes 10 credits, and pulling a video's YouTube captions into your library is free, citation included.