Six Rules for WEB Citations

More and more students are using the World Wide Web to research their term papers.  As far as I know, there is as yet no single standard for doing footnotes and bibliographies citing WEB resources.  There are, however, a number of rules which my students should follow.

1.  Provide as much information as possible.

2.  Be consistent in the way you present information.

3.  If the information is available in print form, then use the citation format as if you had read the material in a book, magazine, or newspaper.  Additionally add:  Available online from . . .[list URL]  and Accessed on . . .[list date].

4.  If the material is not available in print form, then try to put it into a standard format.  The general rule for bibliographies is:

a.  List the author who wrote the material. List in alphabethical order.  Last name first for first author only.  If no author is given, then omit this first entry.

b.  Next comes the name of the article in quotation marks.  Many WEB pages have a heading.  Use this heading as the name of the WEB page in quote marks.

c.  The third item in a normal footnote or bibliographic entry is the name of the magazine or title of the book.  This is usually underlined or italics.  For your WEB citation, use the name of organization, whose WEB page this is, as the equivalent for the name of the magazine or book. 

d.  When you use a large Web site like the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation], start with the Home Page and follow the nested pages down to the one you are actually reading.  Follow this example:  BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation]:  History:  British:  Civil War and Revolution.

5.  Rule Five is that you should always remember that the basic purpose for a bibliography is that the reader can find the material cited.  Prepare your WEB citations, so that you and everyone else can FIND the article using the information provided by you.  Give more information rather than less.  Web pages are deleted or archived.  Even if the URL that you gave becomes inoperative, the information in the body of your citating should still make it possible to find the material.  Being accurate is very important, especially when citing an URL.  URLs should work.  They should link to the sources cited.

6.  Lastly, I would like to ask you to group your WEB citations as a distinct category separate from your print material.  In long bibliographies, it is often customary to group government documents, books, magazines, and newspapers into separate categories.  Your bibliographies won't be that long, but for clarity, list print sources first and then do all the WEB sources second. Alphabetize your bibliography within the categories.

7.  Be aware that bibliographies differ from footnotes.  You are doing a bibliography.  If you were to write a term paper, you would have footnotes throughout your text and then your bibliography at the end.