Hi,
A student has cited a multiple page website article without noting any page numbers because none are listed on the site. I want to find his quotation, but don't have time to read through 10 + pages. How is something like this remedied?

Question

Hi,
A student has cited a multiple page website article without noting any page numbers because none are listed on the site. I want to find his quotation, but don't have time to read through 10 + pages. How is something like this remedied?

anonymous · Answer

Well, you can search on the site for that particular quotation, possibly even all in one pass if there's a "print" option.  On many sites, when you click a posted print option, the article is displayed then all on one page.  If you save that version to your machine (as PDF, for instance), you can search the entire article all at once.  I'm not sure whether this is your question.  And such a solution still involves several steps.

In terms of citation styles for web text, I'm not up on those.  Are you asking how a citation of text that is not paginated can be made more explicit with respect to where that text appears in the original?

jagatuba · Answer

For APA, the URL to main article is listed in the reference, but it is a multi-page article the in-text citation should still list a page number regardless of if those page numbers are printed or not. In most multipage Internet articles there is (somewhere on the pages) a navigation link. The numbers on the navigation link should be used in place of actual page numbers, but page notation is still used (Doe, 2001, p. 3) or (Doe, 2001, p.p. 9-10).

I sympathize with your frustration.