How to Cite a Website in BibTeX

BibTeX is a tool and a file format used for managing citations and bibliographies in LaTeX documents. Since citing websites requires a hack, there are a few things to remember when referencing a website in a BibTeX document. To simplify matters, BibLaTeX was developed.

CiteDrive

Overleaf and R Studio are just two of the many online publishing platforms that CiteDrive synchronizes with automatically. In order to facilitate citing academic articles in, say, an Overleaf project, we provide a browser extension that lets you do so without leaving the browser and in the proper BibTeX format. The extension can also be used to save web pages in BibLaTeX format, which will record the page’s title, URL, and access date automatically.

Basic Format

The basic format for citing a website in BibTeX is as follows:

@misc{label,
    title = {Website Title},
    url = {http://website-url.com},
    author = {Author Name},
    year = {Year Published},
    note = {Accessed on Month Day, Year}
}

In this format, the label is a unique identifier for the citation, the title is the title of the website, the url is the website’s URL, the author is the name of the website’s author (if known), the year is the year the website was published (if known), and the note is the date you accessed the website.

Using BibLaTeX

We advise using BibLaTeX because it automatically supports the ‘@online’ entry type and requires no additional configuration for use. The fields “url” and “urldate” are where you can put in the URL and the date you accessed it.

@online{CiteDrive2022,
    title = {Website Title},
    author = {Author Name},
    year = {Year Published},
    url = {http://website-url.com},
    urldate      = {Use the date of access}
}

In-Text Citation

To include the citation in your document, you can use the \cite command followed by the citation’s label like this:

\cite{label}

This will create an in-text citation that looks like this: [label]

Full Reference

To include the full reference for the website at the end of your document, you can use the \bibliography command, followed by the name of your BibTeX file (without the .bib extension), like this:

\bibliography{bibfile}

This will create a reference list that includes the full citation for the website, using the information from the BibTeX file.

With these basic guidelines, you can easily cite a website in a BibTeX file and include it in your LaTeX document. Just remember to follow your target publication’s specific formatting and style guidelines to ensure that your citations are correct.