In Neuromancer, William Gibson depicted a world of hackers and criminals in cyberspace. Given that the novel was written in 1984, long before the rise of the internet, many have hailed Gibson as a visionary author. What Gibson failed to mention, though, is that the internet would also be useful when writing essays. Regardless, if you’re more interested in research than foiling AI-themed conspiracies, you might find this guide to citing a website using the Chicago author-date referencing system useful.
Author–date citations do exactly what they say on the tin: specify the author and date of a source. When citing a website, this means the named author of the page you’re citing and the date it was last modified (since web sources are sometimes changed after they are published):
Experiments suggest that crows have ‘opinions’ (Marzluff 2012).
Some websites will not identify the author or date of publication, though. In these cases, you should use the website or publishing organisation in place of an author’s name, along with the date you accessed the page instead of a date of publication:
Nearly 40% of the site’s users consider themselves activists (openDemocracy 2017).
However, make sure you check carefully for an author and date before omitting these details, as they can be difficult to spot on some websites.
You should also add any website cited in your work to a reference list at the end of the document. The format to use for online sources here is:
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Surname, First Name. Year. ‘Page Title’. Site Name/Publishing Organisation. Day and Month published/accessed. URL.
As with citations, if no author is named for the page you’re citing, you can use the site name/publishing organisation instead. As such, you would list the websites cited above as follows:
Marzluff, John. 2012. ‘Crows Have Opinions’. Psychology Today. Last modified 28 November. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/avian-einsteins/201211/crows-have-opinions
openDemocracy. 2017. ‘About openDemocracy’. Accessed 1 August. https://www.opendemocracy.net/about
As you can see, when the site name is used in place of an author, it is not repeated later in the reference. In addition, you should use ‘last modified’ when referring to a date of publication, and ‘accessed’ when no date is available on a webpage.
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