The first rule of Fight Club academic papers is to cite your information. (To be honest, we hope it will be more common in other writing as well.) Two common styles of academic writing are MLA and APA.
Both provide guidelines on how to clearly record and format references to other works such as books, articles, and websites. In addition, both clearly stipulate the rules on how to specifically cite YouTube videos.
The MLA Handbook is published by the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) and is most commonly used for academic writing in the humanities. The current version of this manual is the eighth edition released in 2016. However, style manual lovers may be happy, because the ninth edition will be released in April 2021!
Rather than following the MLA rules, academic writers in the social and behavioral sciences usually use the APA style of the American Psychological Association (APA) .
The current APA style manual is the American Psychological Association Publication Manual, seventh edition . Just like MLA, APA also has rules on how to cite YouTube videos in academic articles. We will introduce these two styles below.
How to cite YouTube videos in MLA
MLA provides templates for the core elements found in the references. Most resources have common attributes, such as author, title, and publication date. The MLA core element template lists these elements in a specific order. This is how you determine which elements to list in the order of reference and the order in which they are listed.
Step-by-step instructions for citing YouTube videos in MLA
MLA references to YouTube videos will in turn contain the following information:
- The creator of the video, whose surname format is: FirstName (If it is the same as the uploader in step 4, ignore this name), then add a period.
- “Video Title”. (Please note the quotation marks and periods.)
- Platform-in this case YouTube(Make sure to use
- The YouTube channel or user who uploaded the video, followed by a comma.
- Upload date, the format is: DDMo. YYYYfollowed by a comma.
- URL (not including http://), ending with a period.
For a YouTube video uploaded by the creator, the reference may look like
“Garlic Noodle|Kenji’s Cooking Show.” YouTube , uploaded by J. Kenji López-Alt, September 13, 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK9OHVxB_Z8 .
Here is another example:
“Mars rover began to search for extraterrestrial life on the “Red Planet”-BBC News.” YouTube , uploaded by BBC News, February 18, 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=E00731OeWCA .
<Picture category=” aligncenter size-large”>
What if the video was uploaded by a different person from the creator of the video? This is an example of uploading a citation that is different from the creator.
Kuwahata, Ru and Porter, Max. “Negative Space|Oscar-nominated stop motion animation|Within a week.” YouTube , uploaded by “Short of Week” on July 16, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch? v = KI2lsdXJQ40.
MLA conveniently provides interactive exercise templates to help you get your citations correct. Although they say that the template is “not a citation generator”, it should be enough to help you create citations, which you can then check again according to the MLA manual .
How to cite YouTube videos in APA
The format of APA citing YouTube videos is slightly different, and depending on the video you want to cite, you may need to do some additional research.
Step-by-step instructions to cite YouTube videos with APA
The order in which YouTube videos are referenced in APA will contain the following information:
- The real name and last name of the uploader/creator, followed by a period, such as ” López-Alt, Kenji.“. You may have to visit the creator’s profile page to determine his real name. If you can’t find their real names, skip to step 2.
If the uploader is not the creator, please do some research and try to find the same video that the creator uploaded elsewhere, such as on the creator’s YouTube channel, and cite the video.
- The uploader’s screen name is placed in square brackets, followed by a period, such as ” [KenjiLópez-Alt].“.
- The release date of the video is enclosed in parentheses, followed by a period, such as ” (yyyy, Month dd).“. Only the first word and any proper nouns capitalized, and not after the title plus the period.
- File type in brackets, followed by a period, for example ” .“
- The name of the site, followed by a period, such as “YouTube”.
- URL, such as ” http”: //www.youtube.com/watch? v = wK9OHVxB_Z8“
Note: APA style requires you to indent all lines after the first line
Therefore, this is an APA-style quote with the author’s real name and screen name:
López-Alt, Kennedy. [Kenji López-Alt. (Kenji López-Alt.) September 13, 2020. Kenji’s cooking show
. YouTube.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK9OHVxB_Z8 .
YouTube quotes where the uploader/creator is an organization might look like this:
BBC News. On February 18, 2021, Mars rover began to search for extraterrestrial life on Red Planet-BBC News [Video]. YouTube.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=E00731OeWCA .
<Picture category=” aligncenter size-large”>
If you want to quote the entire YouTube channel in APA style, follow the example below:
López-Alt, K. (nd). Homepage [YouTube Channel]. YouTube. From https://www.youtube.com/user/kenjialt on February 20, 2021
López-Alt, K. (nd) search. Playlist [YouTube channel]. YouTube. Playlist from https://www.youtube.com/c/JKenjiLopezAlt/
“Nd.” In the example above, “no date” stands for “no date” because the YouTube channel does not attach a specific date, and the content of the channel may change over time.
