How to cite

ChatGPT
By Timothy McAdoo
Date created: April 7, 2023
7 min read
35 Comments

References

We, the APA Style team, are not robots. We

can all pass a CAPTCHA test, and we know
our roles in a Turing test. And, like so many
nonrobot human beings this year, we’ve
spent a fair amount of time reading, learning,
and thinking about issues related to large
language models, artificial intelligence (AI), AI-
generated text, and specifically ChatGPT.
We’ve also been gathering opinions and
feedback about the use and citation of
ChatGPT. Thank you to everyone who has
contributed and shared ideas, opinions,
research, and feedback.

In this post, I discuss situations where

students and researchers use ChatGPT to
create text and to facilitate their research, not
to write the full text of their paper or
manuscript. We know instructors have
differing opinions about how or even whether
students should use ChatGPT, and we’ll be
continuing to collect feedback about
instructor and student questions. As always,
defer to instructor guidelines when writing
student papers. For more about guidelines
and policies about student and author use of
ChatGPT, see the last section of this post.

Quoting or
reproducing the text
created by ChatGPT in
your paper
If you’ve used ChatGPT or other AI tools in
your research, describe how you used the
tool in your Method section or in a
comparable section of your paper. For
literature reviews or other types of essays or
response or reaction papers, you might
describe how you used the tool in your
introduction. In your text, provide the prompt
you used and then any portion of the relevant
text that was generated in response.

Unfortunately, the results of a ChatGPT “chat”

are not retrievable by other readers, and
although nonretrievable data or quotations in
APA Style papers are usually cited as
personal communications, with ChatGPT-
generated text there is no person
communicating. Quoting ChatGPT’s text from
a chat session is therefore more like sharing
an algorithm’s output; thus, credit the author
of the algorithm with a reference list entry and
the corresponding in-text citation.

Example:

When prompted with “Is the left

brain right brain divide real or a
metaphor?” the ChatGPT-
generated text indicated that
although the two brain
hemispheres are somewhat
specialized, “the notation that
people can be characterized as
‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’ is
considered to be an
oversimplification and a popular
myth” (OpenAI, 2023).

Reference

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14

version) [Large language

model].

https://chat.openai.com/chat

You may also put the full text of long

responses from ChatGPT in an appendix of
your paper or in online supplemental
materials, so readers have access to the
exact text that was generated. It is particularly
important to document the exact text created
because ChatGPT will generate a unique
response in each chat session, even if given
the same prompt. If you create appendices or
supplemental materials, remember that each
should be called out at least once in the body
of your APA Style paper.

Example:

When given a follow-up prompt of

“What is a more accurate
representation?” the ChatGPT-
generated text indicated that
“different brain regions work
together to support various
cognitive processes” and “the
functional specialization of different
regions can change in response to
experience and environmental
factors” (OpenAI, 2023; see
Appendix A for the full transcript).

Reference

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14

version) [Large language

model].

https://chat.openai.com/chat

Creating a reference
to ChatGPT or other AI
models and software
The in-text citations and references above are
adapted from the reference template for
software in Section 10.10 of the Publication
Manual (American Psychological Association,
2020, Chapter 10). Although here we focus on
ChatGPT, because these guidelines are
based on the software template, they can be
adapted to note the use of other large
language models (e.g., Bard), algorithms, and
similar software.

The reference and in-text citations for

ChatGPT are formatted as follows:

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14

version) [Large language

model].

https://chat.openai.com/chat

Parenthetical citation: (OpenAI,

2023)

Narrative citation: OpenAI

(2023)

Let’s break that reference down and look at

the four elements (author, date, title, and
source):

Author: The author of the model is OpenAI.

Date: The date is the year of the version you

used. Following the template in Section 10.10,
you need to include only the year, not the
exact date. The version number provides the
specific date information a reader might need.

Title: The name of the model is “ChatGPT,” so

that serves as the title and is italicized in your
reference, as shown in the template. Although
OpenAI labels unique iterations (i.e.,
ChatGPT-3, ChatGPT-4), they are using
“ChatGPT” as the general name of the model,
with updates identified with version numbers.

The version number is included after the title

in parentheses. The format for the version
number in ChatGPT references includes the
date because that is how OpenAI is labeling
the versions. Different large language models
or software might use different version
numbering; use the version number in the
format the author or publisher provides, which
may be a numbering system (e.g., Version
2.0) or other methods.

Bracketed text is used in references for

additional descriptions when they are needed
to help a reader understand what’s being
cited. References for a number of common
sources, such as journal articles and books,
do not include bracketed descriptions, but
things outside of the typical peer-reviewed
system often do. In the case of a reference for
ChatGPT, provide the descriptor “Large
language model” in square brackets. OpenAI
describes ChatGPT-4 as a “large multimodal
model,” so that description may be provided
instead if you are using ChatGPT-4. Later
versions and software or models from other
companies may need different descriptions,
based on how the publishers describe the
model. The goal of the bracketed text is to
briefly describe the kind of model to your
reader.

Source: When the publisher name and the

author name are the same, do not repeat the
publisher name in the source element of the
reference, and move directly to the URL. This
is the case for ChatGPT. The URL for ChatGPT
is https://chat.openai.com/chat. For other
models or products for which you may create
a reference, use the URL that links as directly
as possible to the source (i.e., the page where
you can access the model, not the publisher’s
homepage).

Other questions about

citing ChatGPT
You may have noticed the confidence with
which ChatGPT described the ideas of brain
lateralization and how the brain operates,
without citing any sources. I asked for a list of
sources to support those claims and ChatGPT
provided five references—four of which I was
able to find online. The fifth does not seem to
be a real article; the digital object identifier
given for that reference belongs to a different
article, and I was not able to find any article
with the authors, date, title, and source details
that ChatGPT provided. Authors using
ChatGPT or similar AI tools for research
should consider making this scrutiny of the
primary sources a standard process. If the
sources are real, accurate, and relevant, it
may be better to read those original sources
to learn from that research and paraphrase or
quote from those articles, as applicable, than
to use the model’s interpretation of them.

We’ve also received a number of other

questions about ChatGPT. Should students
be allowed to use it? What guidelines should
instructors create for students using AI? Does
using AI-generated text constitute plagiarism?
Should authors who use ChatGPT credit
ChatGPT or OpenAI in their byline? What are
the copyright implications?

On these questions, researchers, editors,

instructors, and others are actively debating
and creating parameters and guidelines.
Many of you have sent us feedback, and we
encourage you to continue to do so in the
comments below. We will also study the
policies and procedures being established by
instructors, publishers, and academic
institutions, with a goal of creating guidelines
that reflect the many real-world applications
of AI-generated text.

For questions about manuscript byline credit,

plagiarism, and related ChatGPT and AI
topics, the APA Style team is seeking the
recommendations of APA Journals editors.
APA Style guidelines based on those
recommendations will be posted on this blog
and on the APA Style site later this year.

We, the APA Style team humans, appreciate

your patience as we navigate these unique
challenges and new ways of thinking about
how authors, researchers, and students learn,
write, and work with new technologies.

Reference
American Psychological Association. (2020).

Publication manual of the American

Psychological Association (7th ed.).

https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

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Best Newest Oldest

Bronwen Maxson − ⚑
B a month ago

Now that ChatGPT provides unique links to chat

threads, will the style guidance be updated?

1 0 Reply • Share ›

Anuj Gupta − ⚑
A
>
… Bronwen Maxson
3 days ago

I've been wondering about that too. On the one

hand, that helps the documentation process but on
the other hand, it can potentially lead to complex
privacy issues because if a student shares a link to
their ChatGPT chat, OpenAI currently allows any
other ChatGPT user who has that link to continue
that conversation. That presents a risk of potential
private information about the original author getting
leaked in the hands of new authors. This is why I
prefer the APA's current guideline to consider
sharing transcripts of chats manually in an
appendix rather than through such live links.

0 0 Reply • Share ›

Roberto Tuda − ⚑
R a month ago edited

Chat GPT may "write" a nice paragraph citing no

references at all. Or else, it can cite references and
they might be wrong. I think everybody in academia
should check the Chat GPT assertions by Jnding and
citing the source papers in peer-reviewed journals,
i.e.the sources in which knowledge Jrst appeared. As
Chat GPT does not really invent any new knowledge,
we should not cite CHAT GPT, until we look for the real
sources. Then we can mention that Chat GPT provided
the clues.

1 0 Reply • Share ›

Jenna − ⚑
J a month ago

The guidance above (i'm looking at this page on

9/11/2023) assumes writers will copy and paste
verbiage exactly as it is generated by ChatGPT or
other similar tools. It doesn't address when someone
uses AI to generate text, then edits and alters the text
themselves. This is a common way these tools are
used by students.

0 0 Reply • Share ›

Dave Small − ⚑
D 2 months ago

Highly recommend listing aiarchives.org (A.I.

Archives) as a citation tool, it saves the conversation
into a URL so it is easily referencible by others.

The Chicago Manual of Style lists this tool:

https://www.chicagomanualof...

0 0 Reply • Share ›

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