APA bibliography style

Your editor's instructions, viz.,

Reference Style: Citations in the text should follow the referencing style used by the American Psychological Association ... APA's in-text citations require the author's last name and the year of publication. You should cite publications in the text, for example, (Smith, 2020). ...

lead me to infer that all the editor really requires is that you generate parenthetic-style citation call-outs, of the form (Smith, 2020). (Aside: The APA generally requires authoryear-style citation call-outs. However, there's a lot more to "APA style" than just the appearance of the citation call-outs.)

If this piece of inference is correct and if you wish to (or need to) use the elsarticle document class, then all you need to do, in terms of document setup, is (a) specify the option authoryear at the documentclass stage, (b) run the instruction bibliographystyle{elsarticle-harv}, and use citep instructions to create the citation call-outs. Why? Because the elsarticle document class loads the natbib citation management package automatically and because most Elsevier journals that require authoryear-style citation call-outs also require the use of the elsarticle-harv bibliography style.

The following outline should work for you. Observe that it's possible to pass multiple arguments to citep, as long as the arguments are separated by commas.

documentclass[review,authoryear]{elsarticle}
usepackage[american]{babel}
journal{Journal of LaTeX Templates}
bibliographystyle{elsarticle-harv}

begin{document}
... citep[see][]{cjm-ex:17,gonzalez:18,cjm:17,xin:18,wei-liu:13,vaganov:17}. 
bibliography{mybibfile}
end{document}

documentclass[review]{elsarticle}                                                                                           
usepackage[american]{babel}                  
journal{Journal of LaTeX Templates}
bibliographystyle{apa}biboptions{authoryear,sort,comma}   
 begin{document}
... citep{cjm-ex:17,gonzalez:18,cjm:17,xin:18,wei-liu:13,vaganov:17}. 
bibliography{mybibfile}
end{document}