Q. I’m wondering how you would treat an online report from an NGO or watchdog organization? What type of source is it parallel to? I’m asking to instruct my students for the author-date format. There is no specific author, just the organization. There is a specific date of publication, not just a year. This is the specific source, but there are others that are similar: https://humena.org/political-satire-in-egypt-a-peaceful-protest-against-repression/. Thank you.
A. Reports are covered briefly under CMOS 14.117, but you’ll also want to refer to 13.86 and 13.127, which show how to handle organizations as authors, including the use of abbreviations in author-date format.
Most freestanding reports can be cited similarly to books. The report at the URL you point to could be cited in a reference list as follows:
HuMENA and RedWord. 2024. Political Satire in Egypt: A Peaceful Protest Against Repression. HuMENA for Human Rights and Civic Engagement in collaboration with RedWord for Human Rights and Freedom of Expression, November 22. https://humena.org/political-satire-in-egypt-a-peaceful-protest-against-repression/.
As with many such documents, the author and publisher are the same. By abbreviating the author, you allow for concise citations in the text. The example above would be cited as “(HuMENA and RedWord 2024).”
Note that the report itself (published as a PDF file) doesn’t seem to list a date of publication, but the page that offers the PDF and announces its publication does have a date, which you can cite as shown above.
For working papers and the like, see CMOS 14.116.