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, I’ve added a Citation link. Click that and it will show the plain tex 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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