The et al. Rule in APA 7 and How It Changed From APA 6
APA 7's et al. rule is simpler than the confusion around it: three or more authors, et al. from the first citation, no exceptions except two-author sources. Here is what changed from APA 6, the edge cases that trip people up, and where the full stop actually goes.
A supervisor red-pens a citation reading Alvarez, Kim, Osei, and Patel (2023) and writes one word in the margin: shorten. The student who spelled out all four names was not being careless. They learned APA under the sixth edition, where naming up to five authors in full on a first citation was correct, and nobody mentioned that the rule had moved on since.
When do you use et al in APA 7? From the very first citation, for any source with three or more authors. The seventh edition dropped the old first-citation-in-full step entirely. Write the first author's surname, add et al., and stop there, every time that source appears, including the first mention.
APA's own style pages state it without hedging: for a work with three or more authors, include the name of only the first author plus et al. in every citation, even the first one. The organization's style blog frames this as a deliberate seventh-edition change, noting that in-text citations for works with three or more authors now shorten to et al. immediately, rather than waiting for a second mention.
APA's sixth edition worked differently, which is where the confusion actually comes from. University library guides describing that retired rule agree on its shape: a first citation named up to five authors in full, with et al. held back for a sixth author or for any repeat citation once a source had already been introduced. Apastyle.apa.org's current pages flag the seventh edition as a change from the sixth without restating the old rule in detail, so the specific sixth-edition figures here trace to library guidance rather than to APA's own site.
APA is one of several major referencing styles, and each one pairs an author-date, numbered or notes citation logic with its own small print. TextPulse's wider guide to referencing styles maps which family covers which discipline; this piece stays narrowly on one piece of APA's small print, exactly when et al. is required and when it is not.
When Do You Use et al in APA 7? What Changed From APA 6
Laid out by author count, the actual change touches only one band. Two-author citations were never touched, and six-or-more-author citations already used et al. under the sixth edition.
| Author count | APA 6 (first citation) | APA 7 (every citation) |
|---|---|---|
| 2 authors | Both authors named, every time | Both authors named, every time, no change |
| 3 to 5 authors | All authors named in full | First author plus et al., immediately |
| 6 or more authors | First author plus et al., immediately | First author plus et al., immediately, no change |
The rule that actually changed sits entirely inside the three-to-five-author band. That band happens to cover a large share of published psychology and social-science research, multi-author lab studies especially, which is why the seventh edition's change felt sweeping even though the underlying mechanism is a single narrowed threshold: five authors down to two.
Do Two Authors Ever Get Shortened to et al.?
No. A source with exactly two authors is never shortened to et al., under either edition. Both surnames appear in full every time that source is cited, because et al. only becomes possible once there are three names to abbreviate. With two, there is nothing left to shorten, so the rule that changed between editions never applied to this case in the first place.
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What If Two Sources Would Both Shorten to the Same et al.?
APA has a direct rule for exactly this collision. Write out as many names as needed to distinguish the references, and abbreviate the rest of the names to et al. in all citations. This happens if you've two unrelated sources with the same first author and publication year (so shortening both to first-author-plus-et-al. would make them look identical on the page).
APA's own worked example shows two different 2017 papers that both start with a researcher named Kapoor: one becomes Kapoor, Bloom, Montez, et al. (2017), the other becomes Kapoor, Bloom, Zucker, et al. (2017). Spelling out the third author is what separates them, since that is the exact point where the two source lists diverge, and everything past it can still be trimmed to et al. This is precisely the kind of judgment call an in-text citation fixer is built to catch across a full draft rather than one reference at a time.
A tighter version of the same problem shows up when only the last author differs and every earlier name is identical. APA skips et al. altogether there and spells out every author in both citations instead, since abbreviating would erase the one detail that tells the sources apart: Hasan, Liang, Kahn, and Jones-Miller (2015) sitting beside Hasan, Liang, Kahn, and Weintraub (2015). Neither gets shortened, because there is no earlier point of difference to abbreviate from.
Does the Full Stop Go After et or After al?
After al, never after et. et is the complete Latin word for and, so it never takes a period on its own. al. is short for alia or alii, and being an abbreviation is exactly what earns it the stop et never gets. The correct form is et al., not et. al or et al with no stop at all.
A comma never separates the surname from et al. either, so Alvarez et al. (2023) is correct and Alvarez, et al. (2023) is not. When the citation closes the sentence, the period after al. also closes the sentence, and only one period appears rather than two stacked together. These are small, mechanical points, exactly the kind an APA citation generator built around the current seventh-edition threshold catches automatically.
et al. Rules at a Glance
- Two authors: name both, every time, in every citation, no et al.
- Three or more authors: first author plus et al., starting with the first citation, not just repeats.
- Two sources that would collapse into the same et al. form: spell out extra authors until the lists diverge, then abbreviate the rest.
- One full stop only, placed after al, never after et, and never a comma before et al.
Where the citation sits in the sentence changes the form, and narrative against parenthetical is set out separately. Sources with no named author raise a different question, answered on its own page.
The et al. threshold is one rule out of dozens a reference list has to satisfy at once, spacing and indentation and DOI formatting among the rest. A citation generator that builds the whole entry from a real record keeps the other dozen from sliding while a writer focuses on this one, and the sentences sitting above that reference list are where the harder judgment calls actually live.
Frequently Asked Questions
APA 7 requires et al. from the first citation for any source with three or more authors: name the first author, add et al., and stop there. That answers when do you use et al in APA 7 for the vast majority of cases; the only exception worth knowing is that two-author sources are never shortened this way, under either edition.
Content planner and copywriter at TextPulse. Sara runs the blog day to day, from planning and drafting through to publishing. She writes the practical guides: clear explanations of academic writing problems, aimed at the person who actually has to hand something in.
