How to Cite a YouTube Video in MLA and APA

Soon you’ll be doing it in your sleep

The first rule offight clubacademic writing is to cite your sources. (Honestly, we wish it were more common in other kinds of writing, too.) Two common styles foracademic writingare the MLA and APA.

Both offer guidance on how to clearly document and format references to other works like books, articles, and websites. Moreover, both have clearly defined rules for how to cite YouTube videos in particular.

TheMLA Handbookis published by theModern Language Association of America(MLA) and is most commonly used for academic writing in the humanities. The current version of the handbook is the eighth edition which was issued back in 2016. Style manual aficionados can rejoice, though, because the ninth edition is due out in April 2021!

Instead of following MLA rules, academic writers in the social and behavioral science fields more commonly use theAPA stylefrom the American Psychological Association (APA).

The APA’s current style manual isThe Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition. Just like the MLA, the APA has rules about how to cite YouTube videos in a scholarly article. We’ll cover both styles below.

How to Cite a YouTube Video in MLA

The MLA provides a template of the core elements found in citations. Most sources have common attributes, like an author, a title, and a date of publication. TheMLA template of core elementslists those elements in a certain order, and that’s how you determine which elements to list in a citation and in what order.

An MLA citation of a YouTube video will include the following information in this order:

For YouTube videos that were uploaded by the creator, a citation could look like this:

“Garlic Noodles | Kenji’s Cooking Show.”YouTube, uploaded by J. Kenji López-Alt, 13 Sep 2020,www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK9OHVxB_Z8.

Here’s another example:

“Mars rover begins search for alien life on Red Planet – BBC News.”YouTube, uploaded by BBC News, 18 Feb 2021,www.youtube.com/watch?v=E00731OeWCA.

What if the video was uploaded by someone different than the video’s creator? Here’s an example of a citation where the uploader and creator are not the same.

Kuwahata, Ru and Porter, Max. “Negative Space | Oscar Nominated Stop-Motion Animation | Short of the Week.”YouTube, uploaded by Short of the Week, 16 Jul 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI2lsdXJQ40.

Conveniently, the MLA provides aninteractive practice templateto help you get your citations right. While they say the template “is not a citation generator,” it should be good enough to help you to create a citation which you can then double-check against theMLA Handbook.

How to Cite a YouTube Video in APA

The APA follows slightly different formatting for citing YouTube videos, and depending on the video you want to cite, you might have to do a little extra research.

An APA citation of a YouTube video will include the following information in this order:

Note:APA style requires that you indent all lines after the first line in your citation.

So, here’s what the citation could look like in APA style with the author’s real name and screen name:

López-Alt, Kenji. [Kenji López-Alt.] 2020, September 13.Garlic noodles | Kenji’s Cooking Show[Video]. YouTube.www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK9OHVxB_Z8.

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

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

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

López-Alt, K. (n.d.).Home[YouTube channel]. YouTube. Retrieved February 20, 2021, fromhttps://www.youtube.com/user/kenjialt

López-Alt, K. (n.d.).Playlists[YouTube channel]. YouTube. Retrieved February 20, 2021, fromhttps://www.youtube.com/c/JKenjiLopezAlt/playlists

The “n.d.” in the examples above stands for “no date,“ since YouTube channels don’t have a specific date attached to them and the content of the channel will likely change as time goes by.

Argh, It’s Too Confusing!

Properly recording and formatting citations can be a beast of a job, and sometimes the proper format isn’t obvious for the source you want to cite.

Luckily, there are reference management tools to help you, and almost all modern word processors have built-in functionality to automatically format bibliographies. Once you get a few citations under your belt, your confidence will increase, and you’ll be citing YouTube sources in your sleep!

Maggie Marystone is a freelance technology writer, human rights worker, and storyteller based in Chicago.Read Maggie’s Full Bio

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How to Cite a YouTube Video in MLA and APA#

How to Cite a YouTube Video in MLA#

How to Cite a YouTube Video in APA#

Argh, It’s Too Confusing!#