What the seventh edition changed
APA 7 arrived in 2019, and most of the templates circulating in college handouts still follow the sixth. Three differences are visible at a glance: the publisher's city has gone, 'Retrieved from' before a DOI has gone, and the reference list now holds up to twenty authors in full instead of seven. A marker working from the current manual will spot all three.
The DOI is written as a full link — https://doi.org/10.1177/0973184919862284 — rather than a bare number or a doi: prefix, and it takes no full stop after it. Include one whenever the article has it, which is nearly every journal article published since about 2005. Only fall back to a plain URL when there is no DOI at all.
With twenty-one authors or more, you list the first nineteen, then three spaced ellipsis points, then the last author — and no ampersand before that final name. It looks wrong the first time you see it. It is correct, and it is the rule most manual attempts miss because large collaborations are rare in undergraduate reading.
Sentence case is not lower case
In an APA reference, the title of an article, book or chapter takes sentence case: the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns are capitalised, and nothing else is. So 'Groundwater depletion in peninsular India: A district-level analysis' — not the title-case version that appears at the top of the PDF you downloaded.
The journal name is the exception. It stays in title case and italicised: Economic and Political Weekly, Current Science, Indian Journal of Medical Research. A single reference therefore carries two capitalisation conventions at once, which reads as an error until you know the rule. Book publishers are set the same way, as ordinary names.
Enter proper nouns as you want them to appear. No rule-based tool can know that Kerala, Ashoka University and PCR must keep their capitals while 'machine learning' must not, so the capitals in your title field are the ones that come out. Check that line once and the rest of the entry follows automatically.
The citation you actually use most
Each source gets one reference-list entry and, typically, several in-text citations. Both forms are produced here. The parenthetical version sits at the end of a sentence — (Sharma & Rao, 2021) — with an ampersand. The narrative version runs inside the sentence — Sharma and Rao (2021) found — with the word 'and' spelled out. Mixing the two is a common deduction.
From three authors upward, everything collapses to (Iyer et al., 2019), including the very first mention; the sixth edition asked you to spell them out once, which is why older habits produce long first citations. Two authors are always both named. For a direct quotation, add the page: (Iyer et al., 2019, p. 47).
Undated material follows the same shape in both places. A government page with no publication date becomes (Ministry of Education, n.d.) in the sentence and takes n.d. in the reference. Organisations count as authors in their own right, so the National Statistical Office is an author, not a publisher, when it issues its own report.