How to Cite Websites
There are differing opinions about how best to cite sources from the web. Always check with your professor. The first consideration is whether the source is worth using at all. Non-academic websites, news sites, and others not affiliated with a justice agency or University may be unreliable. While you must critically evaluate all sources you use in academic papers, you should be especially careful about Web sites.
The second is whether citing a Web site is the best approach. Often the use of online databases makes it appear as if the information came from the web. Don't be fooled. Most academic journals and books should be cited using in text citations such as (author, date) for summaries or (author, date: pg #) for paraphrases or direct quotes.
While citing Web sites can be tricky, in many cases, useful information is easily available online. For example if you were writing a paper on crime prevention it may be useful to cite the Department of Justice's COPS program. There are two ways to do this.
The traditional APA approach is to cite the website in the text. For example:
The Department of Justice has a number of programs to involve communities in crime prevention (http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/). These programs include…
Another approach used in publications is to keep the narrative flow by using a footnote to provide the website and the date retrieved. This approach acknowledges that online information can change, while providing a marker about when you found this data. For example:
The Department of Justice has a number of programs to involve communities in crime prevention1. These programs include…
1See http://www.cops.usdoj.gov retrieved on March 9, 2009.
Footnotes can be inserted in all word processing programs. In Microsoft Word, see this basic approach.