Q. Hi! One of my authors wants to quote content from an app. It’s like a devotional or thought-of-the-day app, and the content is not available elsewhere online. What’s the best way to cite the material? Thank you!
A. No formal citation is needed. Instead, just make sure that the name of the app and the entity responsible for it (whether that’s a person or a company) have been clearly and accurately identified in the text as the source for the quotation.
Formal citations (as in a note or in a bibliography or reference list) can usually be limited to sources that readers could consult for themselves if they wanted to. Things that others wouldn’t be able to track down online or anywhere else (not even through a library) can usually be described in the text rather than cited in a footnote or the like.