How to Cite a Website in APSA Style

To cite a website in APSA style, list the author (or the organization standing in for one), the year, the page title in quotation marks, the name of the website in roman type, the month and day if the page shows them, and the URL. The pattern looks like this:

Format:

Last Name, First Name. Year. "Title of Page." Name of Website, Month Day. URL.

Worked example (a real, checkable page):

Masters, Jonathan. 2025. "What Is NATO?" Council on Foreign Relations, June 24. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/what-nato.

In-text citation: (Masters 2025)

The rest of this guide covers each element, the pages that resist the pattern (no author, no date, no page numbers), blogs, social media posts, forums, PDFs, and the access-date rule that changed in 2018 and is still shown the old way on university library guides ranking on the first page of Google.

The official APSA website citation format

The governing document is the American Political Science Association's Style Manual for Political Science, revised 2018 edition, available free on the APSA website. The manual is built on the 17th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style and uses Chicago's author-date system, keying each rule to a Chicago paragraph number. For websites, blogs, and social media, the manual lists these elements, in order, taken from the site or platform itself:

1. Full name of the author(s), editor(s), or translator(s), or, if none are listed, the name of the institution standing in for one. For social media, the screenname appears in parentheses after the name, or stands alone if it is all you have.
2. Year of publication.
3. Full title of the page, or the first 160 characters of the post, in quotation marks.
4. Title of the website, blog, or platform.
5. Month, day, and time, where applicable.
6. DOI, URL, or database name, where applicable.

Element by element, here is what the manual asks for:

• Author, first name inverted. Only the first author's name is reversed. When no person is named anywhere on the page, the organization behind the site takes the author position, even when it is also the site's publisher.
• Year as its own sentence. The year the page was published or last revised, closed with a period. When no year can be located, "n.d." takes its place (14.145).
• Page title in quotation marks. Quotation marks are reserved for subsections of larger works: article titles, blog post titles, and website sections all qualify. Capitalize the title headline-style.
• Website title in roman type, no quotation marks. Italics belong to blogs and newspapers (14.86); an ordinary website's name is set plain: Council on Foreign Relations, Freedom House, Pew Research Center. If you cannot tell whether a site counts as a blog, the manual's answer is to treat it as a website (8.192).
• Date after the site name. Month and day follow the site or blog title, set off by a comma, as in the manual's own blog example below. News sites also get a timestamp when one is readily available, because news stories are frequently updated (14.191).
• The URL, in full. Whenever a source is found, read, or used online, APSA requires a direct link, and the link must accompany the other citation data; a bare URL standing alone is never an acceptable reference (14.6). Begin with the protocol (http or https), keep any trailing slash, and preserve the capitalization, since parts of a URL can be case sensitive. Punctuate the sentence normally, so a period follows the URL (14.17).

Which link to use. The manual ranks the options: a DOI first, then a permalink, then a shortened URL (14.7). A permalink is the permanent address a site provides in place of an internal or time-sensitive one. The manual's own illustration: cite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_science, and skip the version that reads http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=political_science. If a page's content will certainly change, the manual also endorses preserving it through a permanent-link service such as perma.cc (14.15).

The access-date rule changed in 2018

Older APSA guidance ended every web reference with the date you viewed the page:

Author. Year. "Title of Page." URL (accessed Month Day, Year).

You will still find that pattern on university library guides, complete with examples dated 2009 and 2012. The revised 2018 manual follows Chicago 17 instead: an access date is only necessary when a publication or revision date cannot be determined from the source (14.12). A page with a visible date gets no access date at all. The manual does add that recording access dates "does not hurt," so an instructor who asks for them is within the style's tolerance; the point is that the current default omits them.

In-text citations for websites

APSA citations are parenthetical: the author's last name and the year, with no comma between them.

(Masters 2025)

If you name the author in your sentence, the year follows in parentheses: Masters (2025) traces NATO's founding to the 1949 Washington Treaty.

Websites raise four in-text problems that print sources rarely do:

• No page numbers. APSA requires a locator for direct quotes, and web pages have no pages. The manual's answer for scrollable text is a chapter number or section heading in place of the page (14.160): (Masters 2025, under "Article 5"). For short pages, the author and year alone are enough.
• An organization as author. Write the name in full the first time with a shortened form declared, then use the short form: (US International Trade Commission 1978; hereafter USITC), and afterward (USITC 1978). A short name like Freedom House never needs shortening.
• No author at all. The page title moves into the author position, and a shortened title in quotation marks serves in the parenthetical: ("Freedom in the World" n.d.). The manual is explicit that "Anonymous" should be avoided unless the source itself is attributed that way (14.79).
• No date. The abbreviation n.d. sits where the year would: (Durant n.d.) (14.145).

Several sources in one parenthesis are separated by semicolons and alphabetized, and two pages by the same author in the same year get letters on the year: (Freedom House 2025a, 2025b). The mechanics are the same as for print sources, and our complete guide to in-text citations covers them across styles.

Worked examples

The examples below either come from the APSA Style Manual itself or apply its rules to real, checkable pages. Patterns with generic names (Last Name, screenname) are templates for you to fill.

1. Web page with an individual author

The most common case: a named author, a dated page, an organization's site.

Masters, Jonathan. 2025. "What Is NATO?" Council on Foreign Relations, June 24. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/what-nato.

In-text: (Masters 2025)

The page title takes quotation marks and headline capitalization. The site name is roman. The month and day come from the page's own "last updated" line, which is a publication or revision date for the purposes of rule 14.12, so no access date appears.

2. Web page with an organization as author and no date

When no person is named and the landing page carries no date, the organization takes the author slot, n.d. takes the year, and an access date becomes required (14.12, 14.145):

Freedom House. n.d. "Freedom in the World." Accessed August 13, 2026. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world.

In-text: (Freedom House n.d.)

The manual does not show where the access date sits in a reference. Chicago 17, the system APSA is built on, places "Accessed Month Day, Year." before the URL, and that is the defensible choice; whatever you pick, keep it consistent across the reference list.

3. Blog post

Blog posts are cited like online newspaper articles, with "blog" added in brackets after the blog's title (14.208). The blog title is italicized, unlike an ordinary website's name. The manual's own example:

Sides, John. 2008. "Who Will Win the Nominations?" The Monkey Cage [blog], January 3. http://themonkeycage.org/2008/01/who_will_win_the_nominations/.

In-text: (Sides 2008)

If the blog lives inside a larger publication, keep citing what you actually read: the post, its title, the blog, the date, the URL.

4. Article on a news website

News sites follow the newspaper pattern: month and day in place of volume and issue, and a timestamp added to the date information when the site displays one, because the story may be revised after you read it (14.191):

Last Name, First Name. Year. "Title of Article." Name of News Site, Month Day, 2:35 p.m. URL.

Two supporting rules from the newspaper section carry over. Add a city or country in parentheses after the publication's title when the location is not obvious from the name (14.193), and set wire service names such as the Associated Press in roman type (14.200).

5. Social media post

The post itself stands in for a title: quote its first 160 characters. The platform is the "website" element, and the date information includes the time when the platform shows one. The screenname follows the author's name in parentheses, or stands alone when no real name is available:

Last Name, First Name (@screenname). Year. "Text of the post, up to its first 160 characters." Platform, Month Day, 8:50 a.m. URL.

In-text: (Last Name Year), or (screenname Year) when the screenname is all you have.

The manual extends this category further than most people expect: email lists and discussion forums count as social media platforms, so their references use screennames too. Comments get lighter treatment. A comment can be cited in the text alone, in parentheses, with the commenter's screenname and the date; it needs no reference-list entry.

6. Report or PDF published on a website

Pamphlets, reports, and brochures are treated as books (14.220): italicized title, publisher information, then the URL where you read it. Applied to a real document:

American Political Science Association. 2018. Style Manual for Political Science. Rev. ed. Washington, DC: American Political Science Association. https://connect.apsanet.org/stylemanual/.

In-text: (American Political Science Association 2018), or declare a short form and use (APSA 2018).

A think-tank PDF and an NGO's annual report follow the same shape. The tell that you have left website territory: the title goes into italics, and publisher place and name appear before the link.

7. Forum or Reddit thread

A forum is a social media platform in APSA's classification, so the poster's screenname is the author:

screenname. Year. "Title of the Thread." Name of Forum, Month Day. URL.

In-text: (screenname Year)

For a reply within the thread, use the comment rule: cite it in your text with the screenname and date, and let the thread itself carry the reference-list entry.

8. Wikipedia and other reference works

Encyclopedias and dictionaries are the exception to everything above: the manual directs that references to them be run in with the text or placed in endnotes, and kept out of the reference list (14.232, 14.242). Name the entry and the work in your sentence, and if you give a link, use the permalink form the manual illustrates with Wikipedia's own political science entry. Whether an encyclopedia anyone can edit is an acceptable source for your assignment is a separate question, and your syllabus answers it before any style manual does.

Special cases

No author

Look harder first: an "About" page or a byline at the foot of the page often names the institution formally. If a person is named, use the person. If only the organization is, the organization is the author, even when it repeats as the publisher. If neither exists, the page title moves into the author position and a short title in quotation marks serves in the text (14.79).

No date

Check the page for a published or updated line, the footer for a copyright year that plausibly applies to the page, and the press-release version of the same content. When nothing can be determined, use n.d. in place of the year (14.145) and add the access date, which is the one situation where APSA requires it (14.12).

No page numbers to quote

Point at structure instead: a section heading, a table name, or a paragraph position (14.160). "(Masters 2025, under 'Article 5')" sends a reader to the right place; a bare (Masters 2025) after a direct quote leaves them scrolling.

A page that keeps changing

For content that will definitely change, the manual recommends preserving a permanent record through a service such as perma.cc and citing the preserved copy (14.15). This matters most for live trackers, dashboards, and any page a peer reviewer will open a year after you did.

Citing a whole website

The manual formats references to specific pages and posts; it gives no entry pattern for a site in its entirety. The defensible practice, inherited from Chicago, is to name the site in your prose with the URL in parentheses and reserve reference-list entries for the particular pages you actually used. If your argument leans on a whole database or project, cite its main page as in example 2 and stay consistent.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

• Appending "(accessed ...)" to every reference. This was the old APSA pattern, and library guides built on the earlier edition still teach it. Since the 2018 revision, the access date belongs only where the source shows no publication or revision date (14.12). Dated page, no access date.
• Italicizing the website's name. Italics are for blogs, newspapers, and other periodicals (14.86). Council on Foreign Relations is roman; The Monkey Cage is italic because it is a blog. Reversing the two misclassifies the source.
• Citing the site when you mean the page. The quoted element is the page or post title; the site name follows in roman. A reference reading only "Council on Foreign Relations. 2025. https://..." has lost the element a reader needs to find the right page.
• A comma between author and year. (Masters, 2025) is APA. APSA writes (Masters 2025). This is the most common cross-contamination error on reference lists converted from APA, and websites, the sources students cite most, are where it surfaces.
• A URL as the entire reference. Rule 14.6 is blunt: a link may never stand alone; it accompanies author, year, title, and site. A footnote consisting of a pasted URL fails APSA on every element.
• Trimming the URL. Dropping the protocol, the trailing slash, or the capitalization can break the link, and the manual says to keep all three (14.17). Copy the permalink exactly as the site provides it.
• Citing a database article as a website. A journal article you reached through JSTOR or ProQuest keeps its journal-article format, with the DOI or database name in the link position. The website pattern is for content native to the web. Our guide to journal articles in APSA style covers that format, including APSA's distinctive "doi:" prefix.
• Citing the internal URL. The address bar often holds a session-specific or time-sensitive URL. Look for the "share" or "cite this page" permalink and use that instead (14.7).

Quick-reference table