how to cite a youtube video apa and MLA 2021

how to cite a youtube video apa and MLA 2021.

The first rule of fight club academic writing is to cite your sources. (To be honest, we would like this to be more common in other forms of writing as well.) Two common styles of academic writing are MLA and APA.

Both offer guidance on how to clearly document and format links to other works such as books, articles, and websites. What’s more, both have well-defined citation rules, specifically for 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 the guide is the eighth edition, released back in 2016. However, fans of the style guides can rejoice because the ninth edition is due out in April 2021!

Instead of following MLA rules, academic writers in the social and behavioral sciences are more likely to use the APA style from the American Psychological Association (APA).

The current APA style guide is the American Psychological Association Publications Guide, Seventh Edition. Like MLA, APA has rules for citing YouTube videos in scientific articles. We’ll cover both styles below.

How to Cite a YouTube Video in MLA

The MLA is a sample of the basic elements in quotations. Most sources share common attributes such as author, title, and publication date. The MLA core element template lists these elements in a specific order, and this is how you determine which elements and in what order to list in a quote.

Step-by-step instructions for citing YouTube videos in MLA

The MLA YouTube video link will include the following information in the order shown:

Video creator in LastName, FirstName format (skip this if it’s the same as the downloader in step 4). with a dot.
Video Title. (Note the quotation marks and period.)
Platform – in this case YouTube, (be sure to use italics followed by a comma.).
The YouTube channel or user who uploaded the video followed by a comma.
Upload date in DD Mon. YYYY followed by a comma.
URL (do not include http: //) ending with a period.

For YouTube videos uploaded by the creator, the link might look like this:

Â«Noodles with garlic | Kenji’s Cooking Show. YouTube , uploaded by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, 13 September 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK9OHVxB_Z8.

Here’s another example:

“Mars Rover Begins Search for Alien Life on the Red Planet – BBC News.” YouTube , uploaded by BBC News February 18, 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=E00731OeWCA.

What if the video was uploaded by someone other than the author? Here is an example of a quote where the author and the downloader are not the same.

Kuwahata, Roux and Porter, Max. Â«Negative space | Oscar Nomination in Stop Motion Animation | Except for the week. ” YouTube , uploaded by Short of the Week July 16, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI2lsdXJQ40.

For convenience, MLA provides an interactive practice template to help you cite correctly. While they say the template is â€œnot a citation generator,â€ it should be good enough to help you create a link, which you can then double-check against the MLA Guide .

How to Cite a YouTube Video in APA

APA uses slightly different formatting for citing YouTube videos, and depending on the video you want to cite, you may need to do a little additional research.

Step-by-step instructions for citing YouTube videos in APA

Citation of a YouTube video in APA format will include the following information in this order:

The real name of the author/uploader, first the last name followed by a period, for example: â€œLÃ³pez-Alt, Kenji. Â»You may need to visit the author’s profile page to find out their real name. If you can’t find their real name, skip to step 2.If the uploader is not the author, do a little research and try to find the same video uploaded by the creator somewhere else, such as the author’s channel on YouTube and quote this video instead.

The display name of the user who added the video, in brackets, followed by a period, for example, “[Kenji LÃ³pez-Alt]”.
The date the video was published is in parentheses, with a period, for example “(yyyy, dd month)”.
Video title in italics. Use only the first word and any proper nouns, and not put a period after the heading.
The file type in parentheses followed by a period, for example, “[Video]”.
The name of the website followed by a period, such as â€œYouTubeâ€.
A URL such as â€œhttp://www.youtube.com/watch. ? v = wK9OHVxB_Z8 â€

Note. APA style requires you to indent all lines after the first line in your quote.

So, this is what an APA-style quote with the real name and alias of the author might look like:

Lopez Alt, Kenji. [Kenji LÃ³pez-Alt.] 2020, 13 September. Garlic Noodles | Kenji Cooking Show

. YouTube.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK9OHVxB_Z8.

A YouTube quote where the uploader/creator is an organization might look like this:

BBC News. 2021, February 18. Mars rover begins search for alien life on the Red Planet – BBC News [Video]. YouTube.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=E00731OeWCA.

If you want to quote an entire YouTube channel in APA style, follow this example:

Lopez Alt, K. (no data). Home [YouTube channel]. YouTube. Retrieved on February 20, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/user/kenjialt

Lopez Alt, K. (no data). Playlists [YouTube channel]. YouTube. Retrieved on February 20, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/c/JKenjiLopezAlt/playlists

“But.” means â€œno dateâ€ in the examples above, since YouTube channels do not have a specific date and the content of the channel is likely to change over time.

Argh, Itâ€™s Too Confusing!

Writing and formatting citations correctly can be challenging, and sometimes the correct format is not obvious to the source you want to cite.

Fortunately, there are link management tools that can help you, and almost all modern word processors have built-in features to automatically format bibliographies. Once you get a few quotes in your belt, your confidence rises and you will be quoting YouTube sources in your sleep!

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