Citations & Bibliography

How to Cite a Website, YouTube Video, Dataset, or GitHub Repo in BibTeX

Modern research cites more than just papers and books. You may need to cite websites, videos, datasets, or code repositories. Here's the correct BibTeX format for each.

Cite a Website

Use @misc or @online (BibLaTeX) for web pages:

% BibTeX:
@misc{openai2024gpt4,
  author = {{OpenAI}},
  title = {GPT-4 Technical Report},
  year = {2024},
  howpublished = {\url{https://openai.com/research/gpt-4}},
  note = {Accessed: 2026-05-01}
}

% BibLaTeX (preferred):
@online{openai2024gpt4,
  author = {{OpenAI}},
  title = {GPT-4 Technical Report},
  year = {2024},
  url = {https://openai.com/research/gpt-4},
  urldate = {2026-05-01}
}

Cite a YouTube Video

Treat a video as a misc entry with the channel as author:

@misc{3blue1brown2024,
  author = {Sanderson, Grant},
  title = {But What Is a Neural Network?},
  year = {2024},
  howpublished = {YouTube, 3Blue1Brown},
  note = {\url{https://youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk}}
}

Cite a Dataset or GitHub Repository

Datasets use @misc with a DOI when available; software uses @software (BibLaTeX) or @misc:

% Dataset:
@misc{imagenet2009,
  author = {Deng, Jia and Dong, Wei and others},
  title = {{ImageNet}: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Image Database},
  year = {2009},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.image-net.org/}},
  note = {DOI: 10.1109/CVPR.2009.5206848}
}

% GitHub repository:
@misc{pytorch2024,
  author = {Paszke, Adam and others},
  title = {{PyTorch}: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library},
  year = {2024},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch}},
  note = {Version 2.2}
}

💡 Tips

•Always include an access date for web resources — URLs can change or disappear
•Use double braces {{Name}} for organization names to prevent BibTeX from splitting them
•If a dataset has a DOI, include it — DOIs are permanent unlike URLs
•BibLaTeX's @online and @software types are cleaner than BibTeX's @misc for these

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