Citation Generators: News Article Edition
Citation generators don't only get confused by journal articles. The same kinds of mistakes show up when you cite a website, a video, or a news story. This activity walks through one real news article and four real generator outputs for it. For each one, select what you think is wrong before you check your answer.
Checked: 0 / 4
The Source
| Author | Umar Shakir |
|---|---|
| Title | The Weirdest “3 Billion People” Data Breach Ever |
| Published | August 14, 2024, on The Verge |
Four attempts, using MyBib, Scribbr, and Zotero (tested twice), each produced a reference for this exact article. None of the four got it fully right.
The APA Template for an Article on a News Website
Just like the journal template, this is a strict structure. One piece out of place and the citation is no longer correct, even if it still reads fine at a glance.
Notice the quotation marks around “3 billion people” are part of the article's actual title, not an APA formatting choice. Hold onto this version, you'll check each tool's attempt against it.
Four Generators, Same Article
These are real screenshots from each tool. Zotero appears twice because it produced two different kinds of errors depending on how it was run. For each one, select every issue you find, then select Check my answer.
MyBib
What's wrong: The date only lists the year, dropping the month and day entirely, even though APA requires the full date for a news website article. It also inserts “In The Verge,” a construction borrowed from how you'd cite a chapter inside an edited book, which doesn't apply here. The quotation marks around the title phrase were also swapped to single quotes instead of matching the article's actual double quotes.
Scribbr
What's wrong: The URL is cut off partway through and no longer leads anywhere. A broken link makes a citation unusable, no matter how correct the rest of it looks. The quotation marks are also wrong again, single instead of double.
Zotero
What's wrong: This isn't a formatting slip, it's the wrong citation style entirely. Spelling out the full first name, putting the whole title in quotation marks with Title Case, and writing the date as “14 Aug. 2024” are all MLA conventions, not APA. Some generators default to the wrong style if you don't tell them which one you need, so always confirm the style before you trust the output.
Zotero
What's wrong: The “Retrieved [date] from” phrasing is left over from an older edition of APA. Current APA style only asks for a retrieval date when the content is likely to change over time, which a published news article is not, so that whole phrase should be dropped. The quotation marks are wrong here too.