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Librarian's Help Desk Archive

Reference Lists Part 2: How to Cite Internet Publications

By Anneli Meeder - July 29, 2005

As we have seen in the previous Help Desk article (Reference Lists Part 1: General Guidelines), reference lists or bibliographies of reports serve two important functions:

They provide verification of the text by identifying the sources of information,
They give the reader all the data necessary to find and consult the sources directly.

More and more often, useful information can be found on the Internet from various sources: government agencies, research institutes, publishers, companies, personal websites etc. All Internet publications can be classified according to their level of availability:

Publications that are available online and in print at the same time,
Publications that are only available online, but not in print.

The first of these are far easier to deal with in a reference list than the second, as you will see below:

Publications that are available online and in print format

If a publication that was accessed through the Internet is also available in print format (such as a journal article, or a report on a government website), it is advisable to reference is as a print publication (see Reference Lists Part 1: General Guidelines) using the full source (such as journal title, volume, date and page numbers). It is however possible to let the reader know that a publication also exists on the Internet and to give a link for it as part of the citation.

When a publication has been published in print, the print version is always the definitive version.

Publications that are only available online, but not in print

Keeping in mind that we want to give the reader the means to consult all the references exactly as they were when they were referenced, consider the following challenges:

Web page addresses change frequently,
Web pages can disappear completely,
Articles can be updated without long-term retention of the previous version.

My own experience in maintaining the InfoMine Publications database, which to date contains almost 5000 links to technical papers, indicates, that about 10% of all links to technical references change over the course of a year. The papers are moved, they are updated, or they are removed. A bibliography in a report that is one year old and cites Internet resources would most likely contain a number of “dead” links; i.e. links that lead nowhere. I therefore strongly advise to either keep one printed copy of each Internet-only reference as a backup with the project files, and mention this fact in the reference list; or alternatively attach each Internet-only reference in an appendix of the report.

Citing online references

The citation for an Internet reference needs to contain the same elements as the reference to a traditionally published source: Author, Title, Date, and Source.

Author: if possible, the personal author should be cited. Internet resources such as government websites oftentimes do not show this information, instead, the name of the government agency / company etc. could be used.

There are two dates to keep in mind:

• The date the Internet resource was published
• The date the Internet resource was accessed

If the original publication date is not mentioned, it is usually left out. The date the publication was accessed in the process of writing the report should always be mentioned at the end of the reference.

Source: This part of the citation needs to contain the publisher (if different from the author), and the URL (=Uniform Resource Locator; this is the link that usually starts with http://).

A typical Internet citation could look something like this:

Meeder, A. 2005. Reference Lists Part 1: General Guidelines. Vancouver, B.C., Canada: InfoMine Inc. Available online: http://www.infomine.com/publications/lhd/lhd20050601.asp. Accessed July 27, 2005.

Style elements such as italics, number of authors to list etc. should be consistent with other references in the list, cf. the first part of this guide (Reference Lists Part 1: General Guidelines).

A good list of examples for citations that follow the APA style guide can be found here:
http://www.crk.umn.edu/library/links/apa5th.htm