Citing web pages in academic research papers and theses

Since most students prefer the speed and convenience of doing research online, the question may arise:

How can we know if the information given on a web page is up to date?

For some faculties, whether the information is the latest knowledge available may not always matter so much. For example, in some areas of philosophy or ancient literature, some material has not changed much in recent years. In the sciences or technology, it is essential to be up to the minute. If the student quotes information from a few years ago in an academic research paper or thesis, it may no longer be valid, or only partially accurate. For this reason, it is useful to know how current data seen on any web page may be. We may reply:

For most web pages, the date of publication or most recent update should be near the top or end of the page. For any academic citation, it is necessary to have a month, day, and year for the date of publication or latest update. The student should be careful not to confuse this with a year of copyright, which most websites also have. The copyright year is typically seen at the very end of the page, beneath all other information. Since it is a year only, without day or month, it cannot be used to cite in academic research. The student may learn from the copyright year whether the web site is kept up to date. If the copyright year is several years ago, this may be a sign that the web site was posted a while ago and no one has bothered to update it. The student may ask:

What if there are no dates or years at all on the web page?

We may answer:

Try to see if there are broken links on the web page. If the web page is not maintained, and it has many broken links, this can be a sign that no one is making sure that it is current and accurate.               

The student may observe:

All of the links work, but the article I wanted to cite in my research only refers to old publications.

In that case, we may add:

If the article does not cite any new material, it may have been written a while ago and left unrevised since then. That would show us that it does not provide recent information.

If students are aware of new developments in the field of study, they may notice if an article posted on a web page fails to refer to them. For example, students at the Faculty of Physics will know that in 2012, an important discovery was made at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, in Switzerland of a particle known as the Higgs boson. The fact that this particle exists explains why the basic elements of the universe have mass. As a result, the following year, Professor Peter Higgs of the UK, and Professor François Englert of Belgium, were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. If an article posted online is about particles but does not refer to the Higgs Boson discovery or even seem to be aware of it, it is likely the article was written before 2012. In that case, it should not be quoted as providing up to date material.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)