§ 01Make the Date Part of the Citation
A URL is not a citation. It is an address, and addresses change — pages are deleted, domains expire, CMS migrations silently redirect or break old paths. When you cite an online source, the access date is not a bureaucratic formality; it is evidence of what existed when you checked. Always record it, even when your chosen style guide makes it optional.
Beyond the access date, look for a permalink — a URL explicitly designed for permanence. Many academic journals, institutional repositories, and news organisations publish these alongside ordinary page URLs. A DOI, for instance, is a managed permalink: a publisher may move a paper to a new server, but the DOI resolver follows it. If a source has a DOI, use that instead of the raw URL.
§ 02When There's No Permalink, Archive It
For sources without a stable identifier — a blog post, a government statistics page, a social-media thread — your best insurance is the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive (archive.org). Paste the live URL, capture a snapshot, and use the resulting archive link in your citation alongside the original. That snapshot is frozen at a specific timestamp and will not move.
Some institutions run their own archiving tools, and several reference managers can trigger captures automatically. The habit matters more than the tool: capture before you cite, not after the page has gone.
§ 03What a Good Online Citation Contains
A robust web citation needs five things: the author or responsible organisation, the title of the page or document, the publication or last-updated date (where stated), the URL or DOI, and your access date. If the original URL is unstable, replace it — or supplement it — with the archive link. When a page carries no date at all, say so explicitly ("no date") rather than omitting the field, since "no date" signals to a reader that you looked and found nothing, not that you forgot to check.
Avoid citing landing pages or homepages when a direct, deeper link exists. Depth and precision reduce the chance that a reader following your reference lands somewhere irrelevant after a site restructure.
§ 04The Discipline Behind the Link
Online sources are not second-class citations — much primary evidence now lives only on the web. Treating a URL as a finished citation, though, is a quiet form of carelessness: it looks like a reference but provides no reliable path back to what you read. The discipline is simple: capture, date, archive, and when a stable identifier exists, use it.
APPENDIXAttached to the record
| Term | As used in this record |
|---|---|
| Permalink | a URL intended to remain stable indefinitely |
| Access date | the date on which a cited web page was visited |
| DOI | persistent identifier for digital objects, managed by a resolver |
| Wayback Machine | Internet Archive tool for capturing and retrieving web snapshots |
Filed as general information, in a precise reference voice — not legal advice.