How to Make Source Cards for a Website

Where do I begin?

Making source cards for a website is similar to making a source card for any source, be it written or electronic. Source cards are references for you, the writer, as you begin researching a given topic. You handwrite the source information onto a 3x5 index card so that you'll be able to have the information at hand when you're writing your research paper. Your job as researcher is to write down every bit of pertinent source information from every source, and much of the information you'd find for a book or magazine is usually available on websites, too. It's just more difficult to find.

Instructions

Finding the Important Information

1. 

   Colors are nice, but they're not necessary.

   Write down the bibliographic information. If you want to write the information in the order it will have to be in for the "Works Cited" page (this used to be called the bibliography, the list of sources at the end of the research paper), it should be like this: 1) author, 2) article (page) title, 3) website title, 4) hosting organization, 5) date of last update, 6) date you visited the site and took down information, 7) the word "web" and 8) web address (URL).

2. 

   Write down everything.

   Look in the header and footer of web pages for the most important bibliographic information. Websites typically place bibliographic information in these places. Look underneath titles for authors or editors. Look in the "small print" anywhere you see it to find copyrights, updates, hosting organizations and more. As you find pieces of information, write it down. You can always reorganize it later in the proper order.

3. 

   Put a number in the corner.

   Look at the "parent" site if bibliographic information is missing. Adjust the URL to find the parent site. For instance, if the URL of the website is http://www.website.net/info_article1.html, and you're having a hard time finding date of last update, or the website title, take the "/info_article1.html" off the URL and go to website.net's main page. Often, you can find most of the missing information there.

4. 

   Now you can start taking notes.

   Add a number to your source card in the top right corner. This is necessary when you begin to take notes on the 4x6 cards.

Tips & Warnings

• Two major websites, citationmachine.net and easybib.com, take a lot of the guesswork away. They both offer fill-in-the-blank forms that produce a perfect works cited citation when completed. You could also use them to fill in your source card correctly if your teacher or professor wants the source cards in perfect order.

• The biggest difficulty afflicting those who use the internet for research is finding the information available on websites. Remember, if there's no author, skip that part. If there's no date of last update, skip that, too. MLA wants as much information as is available, so don't worry if something isn't.

References

• Citation Machine: MLA Source Cards

Resources

• Web Sources