Citing Internet Resources

There is no single standard way of citing electronic resources. However, the following excerpt is a very useful outline from the American Psychological Association Style Guide.

The variety of material available on the Web, and the variety of ways in which it is structured and presented, can present challenges for creating usable and useful references. Regardless of format, however, authors using and citing Internet sources should observe the following two guidelines:

Direct readers as closely as possible to the information being cited; when ever possible, reference specific documents rather than home or menu pages.
Provide addresses that work.

Documents available via the Internet include articles from periodicals (e.g., newspaper, newsletter, or journal); they may stand on their own (e.g., research paper, government report, online book or brochure); or they may have a Web-based format (e.g., Web page, newsgroup).

At a minimum, a reference of an Internet source should provide a document title or description, a date (either the date of publication or date of the latest update or the date of retrieval), and an address (in Internet terms, a uniform resource locator, or URL). Whenever possible, identify the authors of a document as well.

The URL is the most critical element: If it doesn't work, readers won't be able to find the cited material, and the credibility of your paper or argument will suffer. The most common reason URLs fail is that they are transcribed or typed incorrectly; the second most common reason is that the document they point to has been moved or deleted.

If you are using a word-processing program, the easiest way to transcribe a URL correctly is to copy it directly from the address window in your browser and paste it into your paper (make sure the automatic hyphenation feature of your word processor is turned off). Do not insert a hyphen if you need to break a URL across lines; instead, break the URL after a slash or before a period.

Test the URLs in your references regularly when you first draft a paper, when you submit it for peer review, when you're preparing the final version for publication, and when you're reviewing the proofs. If the document you are citing has moved, update the URL so that it points to the correct location. If the document is no longer available, you may want to substitute another source (e.g., if you originally cited a draft and a formally published version now exists) or drop it from the paper altogether.

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