Citation guides

How to Cite a Report: Government and Organisation Reports

Cite a government or organisation report in APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago and IEEE: who the author is, report numbers, and when to name the publisher.

Reports from governments, agencies and organisations such as the WHO are some of the best sources a student can use, and some of the most often cited wrongly. The trouble is rarely the format. It is working out who the author is, whether the organisation counts as the publisher too, and what to do with a report number. This guide answers those three questions first, then shows each style.

Find the details on the title page

Open the report itself, not just its web page. The title page and the page behind it usually give everything you need:

• The author: named people, or only the organisation.
• The full title, including any subtitle after a colon.
• A report or publication number, if there is one.
• The publisher, which is often the same organisation.
• The year, and a DOI or a stable URL.

Named authors are easy to miss. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 is listed in CrossRef, the DOI database, with only the agency as its author, but NIST's own publication page names three authors: Cherilyn Pascoe, Stephen Quinn and Karen Scarfone. A citation tool that reads the DOI cannot know that, so check the title page whenever you paste a report into the citation generator.

APA 7th edition

The title is in italics and sentence case. A report number goes in brackets right after the title, in the wording the report uses. When the organisation that wrote the report also published it, leave the publisher out.

When a report comes from a unit inside a larger department, name the most specific unit as the author and the parent department as the publisher.

MLA 9th edition

When an organisation or a government body is both author and publisher, MLA skips the author and starts with the title, naming the organisation once as publisher. A report with a named author starts with that person.

Harvard style

Cite Them Right Harvard keeps the organisation as author even when it is also the publisher, gives the place and the publisher, and ends with the URL and the date you accessed it. Use the Harvard reference generator to get the punctuation right.

Chicago style

In the 18th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style the place of publication is optional, so the entry can go straight from the title to the publisher. Titles are in headline-style capitals.

IEEE

IEEE puts the title in quotation marks and gives the organisation, its location and the report number after it. See the IEEE citation guide for the rest of the style.

Specific situations

A chapter with its own authors

Large assessment reports, such as those from the IPCC, give each chapter its own authors and name editors for the whole report. Cite the chapter you used like a chapter in an edited book: chapter authors, chapter title, then "In" and the editors and title of the full report.

The executive summary only

If you only read the summary, say so in your sentence, but cite the report it belongs to. A summary published as a separate document with its own title gets its own reference.

A report in a numbered series

Copy the series and number exactly as printed, including letters and dashes: NIST CSWP 29, not CSWP-29 or No. 29. In APA it goes in brackets after the title; in IEEE it comes before the date.

An updated or revised edition

Cite the version you read and use its date. If the publication page lists several versions, the one you downloaded is the one in your reference list.

Quick reference: reports by style

Quick rules that apply in every style

• Take the author from the report's title page, not from the website or a database record.
• Write organisation names in full in the reference list.
• Copy report numbers exactly as printed.
• Prefer a DOI to a URL, and a stable publication page to a direct link to a PDF that may move.