Web Citation Style

Typist Here are some tips for giving simple web citations in your essays. They basically follow the printed-text type of reference except for 2 key points: giving the website address, of course, and also giving the date on which you accessed it (since many websites change contents often, or even disappear).

Example 1, text:

"M Morgan, a prolific writer on the topic of African American discourse (see e.g. the 10 works listed in Patrick 2002)"

Example 1, Citation:

[include this in the References section at the end:]

"Patrick, Peter L. 2002. A Bibliography of works on African American English.
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp/ aavesem/Biblio.html
Cited 25 November 2002 (last updated 8 Nov 2002)."

In this case you can find the "last updated" info at the bottom of (all) my webpage(s). It’s a common feature, but isn’t always there. It’s comparable to the “edition” information for a published work. Some webpages will not have such information, however. It may be relevant too, or instead, to list the name of a sponsoring organisation, e.g. for an official page simply maintained by someone (the apparent “author”) who works for the organisation that appears to be the “actual author”.

Example 2:

http://linguistics.osu.edu/research/publications/jpcl/

is the website for the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. It’s maintained by creolist Shelome Gooden, as the fine print at the bottom indicates:

Webpage last updated May 8th, 2002 by S.Gooden

But the “real author” of the page is probably the journal itself.

Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. 2002.
Journal homepage. http://linguistics.osu.edu/research/publications/jpcl/ . Ohio State University.
Cited 25 November 2002 (last updated 8 May 2002).

Here you could also give “Ohio State University” or “John Benjamins Publishing Company” as the ‘publisher’ if you like, since OSU sponsored the webpage, and JBPC sponsors the journal, but it probably isn’t necessary.

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