How to Cite a Report (Government, NGO & Technical)

Reports come from governments, agencies, international bodies, think tanks and companies. They don't fit the journal-article template, but they are well-structured documents with their own identifiers, and citing them well is mostly a matter of reading the cover page.

Types of Reports

• Government and agency reports: departmental publications, audit-office reports, statistical releases.
• Research institution reports: think tanks, research centres, university institutes.
• International organization reports: WHO, the UN system, the World Bank, the IMF.
• Working paper series: numbered preprints from research bodies.
• Corporate reports: annual reports, white papers, industry analyses.

The core elements stay the same; the author element is what varies.

Core Citation Elements

Author (individual, group or organization), year, title in italics, report or series number if there is one, the publisher or issuing organization, and a URL or DOI if you read it online.

Quick Reference by Major Style

APA (7th Edition):

Examples verified against the issuing bodies:

Where the organization is also the publisher, APA does not repeat it — the reference goes straight from the title to the URL, as in the WHO example.

MLA (9th Edition):

Chicago (18th Edition, Notes–Bibliography):

Chicago's Citation Quick Guide notes that a place of publication is no longer required (CMOS 14.30), so:

Note:

Bibliography:

Government Reports

APA's rule for agency hierarchies is worth quoting because it solves the most common confusion: "The specific agency responsible for the report appears as the author. The names of parent agencies not present in the group author name appear in the source element as the publisher. This creates concise in-text citations and complete reference list entries."

APA's own published example:

Report-number formats vary by agency and are not interchangeable. A verified example — the US Government Accountability Office numbers its reports GAO-yy-nnnnnn:

Copy the number exactly as printed, including its punctuation.

Reports With Individual Authors

When the report credits people, they are the authors and the organization is the publisher. APA's own published examples:

A further example verified against the publisher:

Reports in a Numbered Series

Many research bodies publish numbered working papers, and the number is how readers find them. A verified example — note that it also carries a DOI, which is the most stable identifier available:

The general pattern:

Working papers are usually not peer reviewed. Say so in your text when the finding is load-bearing for your argument.

Reports From International Organizations

UN agencies, the World Bank and the IMF often publish a flagship annual report whose title includes a year range rather than a single year, and getting that wrong is the most common error in citing them. A verified example — the report is the 2023-24 edition, published in 2024, and UNDP's own page supplies this citation:

Where the organization publishes its own recommended citation, as UNDP does, follow it and then adapt the punctuation to your style.

Think Tank and Policy Reports

Research institutions self-publish, so the organization is usually the publisher and sometimes the author as well. Use the individual authors where the report credits them, as in the Brookings example above. Where a report is genuinely published under the institution's name alone:

Corporate Reports

Annual reports, white papers and industry analyses follow the same shape, with the company in the author position. We have not verified a specific corporate report here, so these are templates to fill from the document in front of you:

Annual report:

White paper:

Industry report:

Take the year and the exact title from the document's own cover, not from the page that links to it; companies routinely re-title and re-date these files.

APA does publish a white-paper reference example: "White Paper References" is listed on its reference-examples index. The page itself was unavailable to us today — APA's site blocks automated requests, and the archived capture we retrieved contained only a block page — so we do not reproduce its example here.

Citing Specific Sections

Large reports need a pinpoint:

In-text (APA): (World Bank, 2024, Chapter 3) or (World Health Organization, 2024, p. 12)

Chicago puts the page in the note, as in the WHO note above.

Updated or Revised Reports

Cite the version you read. Where the document states an edition or a revision date on its cover, include it:

If a report has been superseded by a later edition and your point depends on the figure, check whether the figure changed, and cite the edition you actually used.

Where These Rules Come From

• APA: the "Report by a Government Agency References" and "Report with Individual Authors References" pages on the APA Style site (apastyle.apa.org), both citing Publication Manual Section 10.4, plus its "Database Information" page and its "Press Release References" page (which carries a U.S. Food and Drug Administration example). APA's site refuses automated requests, so these were read through Internet Archive captures; the National Cancer Institute, Baral and Stuster examples and the two quoted APA rules come from them.
• APA, corroborated: Murdoch University Library's APA 7th guide, "Reports: Government Agencies and Other Organisations" (libguides.murdoch.edu.au/APA/reports), which gives the same author–year–title–publisher–URL pattern and the same rule for citing by title when no author is given.
• Chicago: the free Chicago Manual of Style 18th-edition Citation Quick Guide (book section, CMOS 14.30).
• MLA: the MLA Style Center's template of core elements (style.mla.org).
• The reports themselves were checked today against their issuing bodies: who.int for World health statistics 2024 (ISBN 978-92-4-009470-3, 86 pages); worldbank.org for World Development Report 2024: The Middle-Income Trap; hdr.undp.org for Human Development Report 2023-24, whose page prints the recommended citation "UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). 2024. Human Development Report 2023-24: Breaking the gridlock: Reimagining cooperation in a polarized world. New York."; the Crossref record for DOI 10.3386/w31234 for the NBER working paper (Patricia Cortés, May 2023, National Bureau of Economic Research); and brookings.edu for the Reber and Turner article (Sarah Reber and Sarah Turner, 4 August 2026). GAO-24-106167 was checked through an Internet Archive capture of its gao.gov page, because gao.gov returns 403 to automated requests; the capture confirms the title and "Published: May 29, 2024".

Full style rules: APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE.

The citation generator has a report type with a "Report number" field and an "Institution" field, and it takes an organisation as the author when you put the whole name in the surname box and leave the first name empty — the two things that make a report awkward in a generic form.