- 3-minute read
- 31st August 2016
Chicago Referencing – Citing a Website
The Chicago Manual of Style’s website states that a ‘citation to a website can often be limited to a mention in the text’. As such, it’s definitely worth checking your university’s style guide when dealing with online material.
However, giving a full citation for online sources will help to ensure clarity, so knowing how to cite a website with Chicago referencing is still a good idea.
Author–Date Citations
Chicago referencing incorporates two distinct approaches: author–date citations and a notes and bibliography system. We’ll cover the ‘author–date’ version first.
This approach uses parenthetical citations in the text, accompanied by full publication information in a reference list. Citations for a website should include the author’s name and a date of publication:
Heidegger’s books were often ‘long and complex’ (Wheeler 2011).
If no author is named, use the name of the company that owns the website instead. If no date of publication is available, use an access date or date of last modification.
In the reference list, give enough information for your reader to find the page cited, including:
Surname, First Name. Year. ‘Page Title’. Website. Date of access/last modification. URL.
For instance, the site cited above would appear in the reference list as:
Wheeler, Michael. 2011. ‘Martin Heidegger’. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Accessed 7 July 2016. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/.
Footnotes and Bibliography
Chicago referencing is typically associated with footnote citations, indicated in the text via superscript numbers (e.g. 1, 2, 3). The first time you cite a website, the information to give includes:
n. Author Name, ‘Page Title’, Website, date of access/last modification. URL.
Find this useful?
Subscribe to our newsletter and get writing tips from our editors straight to your inbox.
If a web page has no author, either use the name of the organisation or leave out the author name and move straight to the page title. For instance:
1. Fair Phone, ‘Fair Phone 2’, accessed August 4, 2016. https://www.fairphone.com/phone/
The crucial thing is providing enough detail for your reader to identify the page you’re citing.
Subsequent footnotes citing the same source can be shortened to just the author’s surname or their name and the page title (the page title is especially important if citing more than one source by the same author). If no author is named, use the organisation and/or page title instead:
1. Fair Phone, ‘Fair Phone 2’, accessed August 4, 2016. https://www.fairphone.com/phone/
2. Rory Boland, ‘Vodafone Voted Worst Network’, Which?, last modified 23 April 23 2013. https://blogs.which.co.uk/technology/phone-networks/vodafone-worst-phone-network/.
3. Fair Phone, ‘Fair Phone 2’.
All cited sources should also be listed alphabetically by author surname in a reference list. The information needed here is the same as in the first footnote for each source, but with author names reversed and slightly different punctuation:
Surname, First Name. ‘Page Title’. Website. Date of last modification or access. URL.
The Boland source cited above would therefore appear in the reference list as:
Boland, Rory. ‘Vodafone Voted Worst Network’. Which?. Last modified 23 April 23 2013. https://blogs.which.co.uk/technology/phone-networks/vodafone-worst-phone-network/.