PMID to APA Citation Converter
Convert a PMID to APA 7th edition format in seconds. Paste any PubMed ID and get a complete APA citation from NLM metadata. Free, no sign-up.
Paste a PMID to get a APA citation
What is a PMID?
A PMID is the accession number PubMed assigns to every record it indexes – a plain number, often printed as PMID: 31536518 at the foot of an abstract. It is the fastest way to identify a biomedical paper: shorter than a DOI and shown on every PubMed page. Paste a PMID into CiteTools, with or without the PMID: prefix, and we fetch the article’s record from the National Library of Medicine: authors, article title, journal with its official NLM abbreviation, year, volume, issue, and pages. That metadata feeds the same formatter as every other input, so you can render the reference in Vancouver – the style most medical journals require – or in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, or IEEE.
How the PMID to APA conversion works
- Copy the PMID from the PubMed record or from the article’s first page.
- Paste it in – with or without the PMID: prefix – and CiteTools fetches the NLM metadata.
- Copy the citation, or switch to another style with one click.
Example input:
PMID: 31536518
About APA Style
American Psychological Association - commonly used in psychology, education, and social sciences.
APA 7th edition is the default style in psychology, education, nursing, and most social sciences. References use initials for given names, sentence case for article titles, italics for journal names, and a DOI rendered as a full https://doi.org URL. CiteTools applies these rules for you, including the ampersand before the final author and the (n.d.) form when no date exists.
Frequently asked questions
Where is the PMID on a PubMed page?
Under the abstract, in the citation details block – a bare number labeled PMID. It also appears in PubMed URLs: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31536518/ ends with the PMID.
Do I need to type the PMID: prefix?
No. A five to eight digit number on its own, such as 31536518, resolves as a PMID when it is the entire input. PMID: 31536518 and PM31536518 work too, and are the safer choice once the number sits inside other text.
Is the APA output suitable for journal submission?
Yes. The reference is rendered from NLM’s own metadata with the official APA definition, including the journal’s NLM title abbreviation, which Vancouver-family journals require.