Web pages, videos, datasets

BibTeX was designed in the 1980s for journals, books, and conference proceedings, so it has no native idea of a web page, a YouTube video, or a dataset on Zenodo. You still need to cite these things constantly, and the standard workaround is the @misc entry type, which accepts almost any combination of fields and lets the style print them sensibly.

The @misc pattern

@misc{oleafly2026,
 author = {{Oleafly Contributors}},
 title = {Oleafly},
 year = {2026},
 howpublished = {\url{https://oleafly.com}},
 note = {Accessed: 2026-07-24}
}

Three details in this entry are worth understanding. The double braces around {{Oleafly Contributors}} tell BibTeX to treat the whole string as one literal name; without them it would parse “Contributors” as a surname and abbreviate the rest to “O. Contributors”. The howpublished field is the traditional home for a URL in classic BibTeX, and wrapping the address in \url{...} makes it typeset in a monospaced font and break cleanly across lines (load the url or hyperref package for this). Finally, the note field carries the access date, which matters because web content changes and disappears; the date tells readers which version of the page you actually saw.

The biblatex alternative: @online

If your document uses biblatex, there is a purpose-built type. An @online entry takes proper url and urldate fields, so the same source becomes url = {https://oleafly.com} and urldate = {2026-07-24}, and the style formats the access date consistently for you. Prefer @online when the bibliography style supports it, and fall back to @misc when you must stay compatible with a classic .bst file. The differences between the two systems are laid out in Classic BibTeX or biblatex.

Datasets and software

Datasets and code releases deserve better than a bare URL when better exists. Repositories like Zenodo and Figshare mint DOIs precisely so the citation can outlive any particular hosting arrangement, so put the DOI in a doi field, or in howpublished as \url{https://doi.org/10.5281/...} for classic styles. Include a version note when the artifact is versioned, because “the dataset” a reader downloads in five years may not be the one you analyzed. Many projects also publish a preferred citation, often in a CITATION.cff file in the repository, and using it is both polite and more accurate than improvising.

Videos and other odd sources

For a video, put the channel or creator in author, the video title in title, the platform and URL in howpublished, and the upload year in year, with your access date in note. The general rule for anything unusual is the same: capture who made it, what it is called, where a reader can find it, and when you looked, and @misc will carry all of that safely through any style.