For citing a webpage or page on an online site, you require the shortest in-text citation and a reference that includes the author’s name, the date of publication, the page’s title, the domain name, and the URL.
The information is presented with different styles of citation. APA, MLA, and Chicago are among the most widely utilized styles.
What is an electronic source?
Electronic sources are any information in digital format—library subscribers to various digital information sources to offer access to students. Digital sources include newspaper articles, journals with full text, company and corporate information, Ebooks, dictionaries, Encyclopedias, economic data pictures of industries, Market research, and more.
Do I need to include additional information when citing electronic sources?
Referencing online or electronic sources may need to be clarified, and it’s not easy to decide what data you should include and where you can find the information. In general, you should give as many details about authorship as well as the location of the source and its availability.
Online or electronic sources need the same data as print sources (author-date, year of publication, title, and publisher). In some instances, additional information might be required. For example:
- The page’s paragraph or section number. The information you provide depends on the data accessible since many websites or electronic sources don’t contain pages.
- Determine the format used by the resource accessed, such as podcast, ebook, etc.
- Give a reliable date for access in the case of online sources. This will indicate when the source was downloaded or watched.
- Provide the address of an online resource, such as the web address or database.
What exactly is a web page? Do I refer to a web page or web page?
A site is an online location where you can find a collection of distinct web pages (called websites).
Consider a website in the same way as the branches of a tree. A website is the branch, and the websites are branches. Consider YouTube for an illustration. YouTube is a site; the channel’s individual pages and the video pages are its sections. Wikipedia is a site where each article is given a separate page.
In most cases, it’s okay to reference an all-encompassing site but rather each webpage. If you’ve used the services of a YouTube video to assist your research, You wouldn’t mention the whole YouTube website but the specific YouTube webpage where the video was posted.
In the text (in-text reference)
If you use a piece of data from a website in your writing, you must include two citations: a concise reference in the text and a comprehensive citation on the page of reference.
If it is a matter of mentions within the text, students may be inclined to include the website address within the body of their work. But URLs could be more precise, longer and more compelling. URLs should not be included within the text of an article.
If you want to write only part of the website’s address in the text, use the author’s last name as well as the date on which the work was first published. If there is no mention of the author, write the name of the particular page along with the year of publication.
If you are quoting directly, You can utilize paragraphs to show where the quote is located in your work. Make the list manually, when necessary and then use”para.” as an abbreviation “para.” for paragraph.
We offer the following advice in our many guidelines:
- If you are using a standalone source, a complete book, television show or film, the name of such sources must be capitalized.
- However, suppose you’re citing an element of a broader source, i.e. the journal article, a webpage on a website or an episode of a television show. In that case, the title must be written at the end of the sentence and not capitalized.
- Short story: do not bold the APA website page’s”name” within the text or at the end of the references.
- To reference all the sources at the end of the work, you must capitalize letters that should be included at the start of the subtitle, at the beginning of each proper noun and at the end of the initial word of the subtitle.
- The title is included in the text when there’s no author mentioned. Instead of listing the reference in (Author-Date) or (Author, Date), utilize (“Title of Page” Date) when citing the APA page citation. Your text reference shows the shift from title case to sentence instance.
Website without author or group the author
- If no writer is available or a group or an organization wrote the page, start with the page’s name. If the website’s name is similar to that of the publisher or sponsor, remove the sponsor and publisher.
- “Title.” Title of Site, Sponsor or Publisher, Day, Month, Year, URL.
- “Turmeric.” National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, Sep. 2016, nccih.nih.gov/health/turmeric/ataglance.htm.
- A website with no information about the date.
- If the website isn’t equipped with any information about the date, or if the site updates the content often (e.g. a website that is a wiki), You should add a date of access at the bottom of the citation to identify what time you visited the information.
- Author Last Name, First Name. “Title.” Website name URL. We accessed Day Month Year.
- Gillingham, Kim. “How to Use the Dewey Decimal System.” Wikihow, https://www.wikihow.com/Use-the-Dewey-Decimal-System. Accessed 6 July 2023.
Additional information
Check out this library’s web-based MLA Citation Guide to find more examples and different ways to cite books using MLA format. The MLA Handbook (9th edition) is within the knowledge centre’s reference library and the Book Stacks. The Purdue Online Writing Lab also has an extensive guide for the MLA format.