Quoting a specific moment in a video â not just the video as a whole â means your citation needs a timestamp, not just a title and URL. Here's the correct format for the three style guides most research and journalism relies on, and how to find the exact timestamp of a quote without scrubbing through the video by hand.
The three formats
Each style handles the timestamp a little differently. Check your institution's required edition if these details matter for grading or publication â style guides get revised over time.
APA (7th edition)
Reference list entry:
Uploader or Author. (Year, Month Day). Title of video [Video]. YouTube. URL
In-text citation for a specific quote includes the timestamp instead of a page number:
(Uploader, Year, 12:34)
MLA (9th edition)
Works Cited entry:
"Title of Video." YouTube, uploaded by Uploader, Day Month Year, URL.
In-text, cite the timestamp in parentheses where you'd normally put a page number:
("Title of Video" 00:12:34)
Chicago (notes-bibliography)
Footnote:
Uploader, "Title of Video," YouTube video, [duration], posted [Month Day, Year], URL.
Reference the timestamp directly in your note text when quoting a specific moment, e.g. "at 12:34."
Finding the exact timestamp
Reading a transcript to find your quote is much faster than scrubbing a video's timeline, but you still need the precise second it starts â not just "somewhere in the middle." Every transcript Scriptube processes stores timed segments as {text, start, duration}, with start in seconds. Find your quote's segment, convert start from seconds to HH:MM:SS, and that's your citation timestamp.
Worked example
Take https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ. Pull the transcript with segments included, find the line you want to quote, and read off its start value â say it's 213 seconds. That converts to 3:33, which is what goes in your citation.
How to do it in Scriptube
Dashboard: submit the video, open the transcript, and use your browser's find function (see searching inside a transcript) to jump straight to the quote. The dashboard shows the transcript as plain text, not a timestamp next to each line â once you've found the quote, pull that video's segments from the API or export SRT/VTT to get its exact start time.
API: request the batch with segments included to get an exact start time for every line:
curl "https://scriptube.me/api/v1/transcripts/BATCH_ID?include_segments=true" \
-H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"
Or export as SRT or VTT, which already format every line with a human-readable timestamp:
curl "https://scriptube.me/api/v1/transcripts/BATCH_ID/export?format=srt" \
-H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" -o quote-source.srt
For every other way to pull timestamps out of a video, see every way to get YouTube transcript timestamps.
Citing more than one moment in the same video
A single video often supplies more than one quote for a paper or article. Each distinct timestamp needs its own in-text citation, but you only need one entry in your reference list or bibliography for the video itself â the timestamp is what changes each time you quote a different moment, not the source entry. Keep a running list of every timestamp you've pulled from a given source so you don't have to re-find them later when a reviewer asks for the exact location of a quote.
Common citation mistakes
- Citing the channel name instead of the uploader when they differ. A company channel might credit an individual speaker in the video description â use whichever name the style guide expects as the "author" for that type of source.
- Leaving out the URL. Unlike a book or journal article, a YouTube citation generally needs the full URL since there's no other reliable way to locate the exact source.
- Using the video's total length instead of the quote's actual position. The timestamp should mark where the quote starts, not how long the video runs.
- Re-deriving the timestamp by eye each time. Scrubbing a video's progress bar to estimate "around four minutes in" is imprecise and slow compared to reading the exact
startvalue from the transcript segment.
A note on accuracy
Auto-generated captions can misspell names or mangle technical terms. Before quoting a line in published research or journalism, listen to that moment in the original video to confirm the wording â the timestamp gets you there instantly, but the transcript text itself isn't guaranteed to be verbatim-perfect. This matters most for a direct quote attributed to a named speaker; see how journalists verify quotes with timestamps for a fact-checking workflow.
What if the video gets taken down later
A citation is only as good as its source staying available. If you're citing a video for something that needs to hold up over time â academic work, journalism, a legal filing â keep your own copy of the transcript, rather than relying on the URL remaining live indefinitely. Videos get removed, made private, or edited after publication more often than most citation guides acknowledge. See archiving statements with timestamps for the same practice applied to fact-checking.
Citing a series or multi-part video
If your source is one video in a numbered series, treat each video as its own source with its own citation â don't cite the series as a whole and expect a timestamp to disambiguate which part you mean. Include the specific video's title (which usually includes the part number) and its own URL, not a playlist URL.
Need to pull timestamps across a whole set of sources at once? Sign up free and batch them in one go.