How to cite a YouTube video, lecture or podcast

Most referencing guides cover books, journal articles and websites, then stop. These four are what students actually get stuck on.

The question that resolves all of them is the same: who is responsible for this thing? That person or organisation is the author, whatever the medium.

YouTube and online video

The uploader is the author, because the uploader is who published it. Use the channel name as it appears, and give the screen name in square brackets if it differs from a real name.

Timestamps. Give one whenever you are pointing at a specific claim rather than the video as a whole — the same logic as a page number. (Crash Course, 2023, 4:12) lets a reader check you in seconds instead of watching twenty minutes.

If the uploader is not the creator — a clip of someone else’s lecture, a re-upload — say so. APA handles this by naming the creator as author and noting the upload; when in doubt, describe the situation in square brackets rather than hiding it.

Lectures you attended

Start with the question your handbook answers: are you allowed to cite it at all?

Many departments discourage citing lectures, on the grounds that a lecture is a teaching aid rather than a scholarly source, and that your reader cannot access it. Some prohibit it. The lecturer is usually pointing at published work you could cite directly instead, and often that is the better move.

Where it is permitted:

That second case is the one people get wrong. If nobody else can retrieve it, APA does not put it in the reference list — there is nothing for a reader to retrieve. MLA and Harvard generally do list it, with the module and institution.

Recorded lectures and lecture capture

Cite as a video, with the institution as publisher and the platform named. The key addition is that access is usually restricted, and saying so is more honest than a URL your marker can follow but nobody else can.

Podcasts

Two levels, and which you use depends on what you are citing.

The host is the author in APA, with the role in brackets. If you are citing something a guest said rather than the host, name the guest in your sentence and let the citation point at the episode — a timestamp does the rest.

The three that catch people out

Undated video. Use n.d. and give an access date. A copyright line at the foot of a channel page is not a publication date for a specific video.

A quotation with no page number. Timestamps replace page numbers for audio and video. For lecture slides, give the slide number.

Content that may vanish. Videos are deleted and podcast feeds move. If a source is central to your argument and looks precarious, archive it — the Internet Archive will capture a page on request — and cite the archived URL alongside the original.

Building the entry

Our citation generator covers online video among its ten source types and shows only the fields the style actually needs, which is the part that makes these formats feel harder than they are — most of the difficulty is not knowing which pieces are required.

If you are citing a lecture and are unsure whether you should be, that question is worth an email to the module leader before the essay rather than after.