Citing web sites

Most students' citations from the web are inadequate. Here's the kind of citation one sees all too often: www.hoovers.com. But if you follow this link, you'll find it simply gets you to the home page of a big business database, full of detailed information on hundreds of industries and thousands of companies, and with links to tens of thousands of articles. Knowing the home page doesn't help you track down a statistic you want to double-check （which, remember, is the point of scholarly citation—to allow others to reproduce and check your work）.

　　So what is missing from such a citation? Lots of important stuff: information about the type of online resource, a specific URL, data on author, the title of the document and a description, a publication or posting date, and a retrieval date, to name the key elements. Without this data the reference is useless in an academic sense.

　　Citation information doesn't automatically come with a downloaded web page, or with a passage copied from a page. As you do your research, know what citation information you need to record, and keep a permanent record of it. For specific citation styles for different kinds of web sites, see the various citation guides later in this section （MLA, APA, Chicago, and CBE）.

　　A final word on citations: use your judgment. Remember that while the web makes it easy to tap into cutting-edge scholarship on any topic, it also makes it easy to wade a morass of weird, non-academic things posted online. Remember that when you're writing a scholarly paper, part of your job is to exercise sound judgment about what to cite and what to steer clear of.

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