APA (7th Edition)
APA treats the channel as the author unless the channel clearly belongs to an individual. The upload date goes in parentheses, and the video is labeled as a video source.
In-text: (Channel Name, Year) — or (Channel Name, Year, 00:14:32) when citing a specific moment.
MLA (9th Edition)
MLA leads with the video title, then the uploader, the platform, the upload date, and the URL.
In-text: ("Title of Video" 00:14:32) — MLA cites by timestamp rather than page number for audiovisual sources.
Chicago (17th Edition, Notes-Bibliography)
Chicago's notes style is close to MLA in structure, but the bibliography entry orders the elements differently and adds an access-context note.
Footnote: Channel Name, "Title of Video," YouTube video, 00:14:32, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxx.
Harvard
Harvard style is close to APA but keeps the author-date in-text citation without brackets around the source type.
Quoting a Video Accurately
Auto-generated captions can misspell names and mishear technical terms, so a citation is only as reliable as the text behind it. Pull the transcript first, find the exact wording at the timestamp you're citing, and check it against the video before quoting it in your paper.
The transcript with timestamps view makes this easy — every line is time-stamped, so you can match a quote to the exact second it was said. For long lectures or interviews, the quote finder searches the full transcript for a phrase and returns the surrounding context.
Generate the Citation Automatically
Rather than filling in the template by hand, the citation generator takes a video URL and an optional timestamp and produces a ready-to-paste APA, MLA, Chicago, or Harvard reference.