Academic citations

Blog post: 2 May 2026

Although my site isn’t designed to fit into the academic world, occasionally an academic paper will cite one of my pages. Everyone uses a different format. That got me wondering if there are is a proper way to cite a web article. The first place I checked was Distill.pub. It’s a site I greatly admire, and it’s also a real journal with amazing people^[1]. They would’ve given a lot of thought to this. At the bottom of each article they give both a text citation format and a BibTeX format^[2]:

For attribution in academic contexts, please cite this work as

Carter & Nielsen, "Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence", Distill, 2017.

BibTeX citation

@article{carter2017using,
  author = {Carter, Shan and Nielsen, Michael},
  title = {Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence},
  journal = {Distill},
  year = {2017},
  note = {<https://distill.pub/2017/aia>},
  doi = {10.23915/distill.00009}
}

Should I do something similar?

I don’t have an academic journal like they do. I would need to find something that would work for a regular web site. I looked for recommendations for BibTeX, and found several suggestions on stackoverflow^[3]:

@misc{…}
@electronic{…}
@internet{…}
@online{…}

The answers on that page and elsewhere were consistent about using

title = {…}
author = {…}

but inconsistent about

year = {…} vs originalyear = {…}
url = {…} (used by ArXiv) vs howpublished = {…} vs note = {} (used by Distill.pub).
note = {Accessed …} vs note = {Online …} vs urldate = {…}

Bibtex.org hasn’t been updated since 2006, and doesn’t have recommendations about citing web sites. I read Bibtex.com’s guide^[4], Bibtex.eu’s guide^[5], and Wikipedia’s cite this page link^[6]. I chose this style:

Patel, Amit J., "Hexagonal Grids", 
  Red Blob Games, 2013,
  https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/

@online{Patel-2013,
  author       = {Patel, Amit J.}, 
  title        = {Hexagonal Grids},
  organization = {Red Blob Games},
  year         = {2013},
  url          = {https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/}
  urldate      = {2026-05-01}
}

I think that includes enough information that someone can adapt it for their own BibTeX needs. In the footer of selected pages, clicking the Citation link will show the plain text and BibTeX citation format. I also added the corresponding meta tags for Google Scholar^[7], although I don’t expect that my pages would appear there. I don’t think the academic citation will be useful for most of my readers, but for those who need it, it’s now there.

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