Updated October 20, 2026
CMOS 13.9 in the Spotlight
From the perspective of writers and editors, URLs do their best work when they’re behind the scenes or just off the page, as in a browser’s address bar. In that role—as the internet address for a specific page or document—it doesn’t matter all that much what a URL looks like so long as it works.
Looks do matter, however, when you need to mention a URL in the text or add it to a source citation or share it with someone in an email or the like. Domain names (like Amazon.com, with or without https:// or www. or a trailing slash) are easy enough to deal with. It’s the URLs that go beyond the home page that tend to get messy.
But just because a URL has been copied from an address bar or via a “share” button and takes you to the right place doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it. Whenever you’re dealing with a URL that isn’t reasonably short and readable by humans, you should look for alternatives.
Getting to the Right Link
Writers typically deal with URLs only when they need to add a link to a word or phrase or when they’re citing a source they found online. It’s usually part of an editor’s job, in turn, to double-check that these links work as intended.
Let’s say you’re writing a blog post, and you mention The Great Gatsby. To make sure your readers are on the same page, you link the title to the version you read: the 2020 mass-market paperback published by Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books division under its Scribner imprint and featuring an introduction by Jesmyn Ward.
This isn’t as easy as it sounds. On January 1, 2021, the original 1925 text for Gatsby entered the public domain in the United States, and dozens of editions, of varying quality, have flooded the market since then. But if you go to Amazon.com and enter some of the publication details there, you should eventually find the right one (now with a “100th Anniversary” badge added to the cover by the publisher):
Here’s what the URL for that page at Amazon might look like, as copied and pasted from the address bar in a browser:
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Gatsby-F-Scott-Fitzgerald/dp/1982146702/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=great+gatsby+mass+market+paperback+jesmyn+ward&qid=1625929848&sr=8-3
That URL is kind of long, but at least it works. Still, it’s ugly.*
Making It Reader-Friendly
That URL from Amazon is ugly, but it doesn’t have to be. To improve it, try deleting text from the end, starting at the point where it looks like it’s intended for a computer rather than a human—in this case, the part beginning “/ref=sr_1_3?dchild= . . .”
Here’s the result:
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Gatsby-F-Scott-Fitzgerald/dp/1982146702
This new and improved URL leads to the same place as the ugly longer version.
You might wonder why we didn’t also get rid of the part after “Fitzgerald” that includes all those numbers (/dp/1982146702) to make an even shorter URL:
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Gatsby-F-Scott-Fitzgerald
But that URL doesn’t work at all (try it):
It turns out that the numbers, in this case the ten-digit version of the ISBN for the Pocket Books edition (following dp, for the product detail page), are an essential part of the URL.†
As for the part we cut off to get the version that works (i.e., the messy string following the ISBN), that stuff reflects the search terms that we used at Amazon to find the title, plus some other details about how we arrived on that page. But those things matter mainly to Amazon. To the rest of us, they’re not important.
Another method to try: Some web pages, including the ones for books at Amazon, include a canonical (i.e., preferred) URL in the HTML metadata. In most browsers, you can find this by choosing “view page source” from the context menu that comes up when you right-click on a page. From there, look for the word canonical by using your browser’s Find feature. In the source HTML for the Amazon page for the mass-market Gatsby that we’ve been discussing, you should find something like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.amazon.com/Great-Gatsby-F-Scott-Fitzgerald/dp/1982146702"/>The quoted URL that follows “href=” (i.e., the hypertext reference) is the one you’d want to use (note that it’s the same reader-friendly URL that we arrived at above).
Plan B: Find a Better Source
Sometimes the thing to do—rather than trying to edit an Amazon or Google Books‡ or other third-party link into shape—is to go to the source. That’s not always possible, but in this case it’s a recent edition, and the publisher maintains a page for it.
A Google search should get you there. Try “simon and schuster mass market gatsby” (or something similar). When we tried that phrase, the first hit turned out to be the right one. Here’s the URL, copied from the address bar for that page:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Great-Gatsby/F-Scott-Fitzgerald/9781982146702
This time there’s no search syntax, and the URL looks a lot like the edited version of the Amazon URL. The main difference is that the one from Simon & Schuster uses the longer 13-digit version of the ISBN.
And at the Simon & Schuster page there’s less danger than there would be at Amazon that a reader will click over to one of the many other editions from other publishers by mistake (though Simon & Schuster offers several editions of its own).
Subscriptions and Permalinks
Now let’s say you’re doing research on Gatsby, and you want to cite a book by John Irwin that you’ve read through your library’s subscription to EBSCOhost. That should be easy, because EBSCO offers a “Cite” link on the page that includes a preformatted Chicago-style author-date citation:
John T. Irwin. 2014. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction: “An Almost Theatrical Innocence.” Johns Hopkins University Press. EBSCOhost.
Aside from the author’s name, which would need to be inverted for the reference list (Irwin, John T.), that works: Citing the name of the database (EBSCOhost) rather than the URL is an option in Chicago style. If you want the URL instead, you’ll find it under the “Share” link:
https://research.ebsco.com/plink/1a5e4383-0383-3a11-a30e-b3a1240f8e80
That URL isn’t all that pretty, but it’s the one to use (the abbreviation “plink” in the URL stands for what EBSCO calls a persistent link, also known as a permanent link—or permalink for short). Readers who don’t have access to EBSCOhost won’t be able to view the full source, but they’ll get an abstract and a few other details that may help them assess the source and decide whether to track it down elsewhere.
DOIs
As we’ve just seen, the presence of a paywall isn’t always a reason not to provide a link. If the URL points to a page that includes details about the source and where or how to get access to it, it will be useful to your readers. A URL based on a DOI (for “digital object identifier,” an international standard for facilitating persistent links)—which many journal publishers now assign to their articles (including those that predate DOIs)—will almost always give you that information.
For example, try clicking on https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875815000663, the DOI-based URL for an article by Laura Goldblatt published in the February 2016 issue of Journal of American Studies. Even if you don’t have access to that journal, you’ll get an abstract for the article and other useful details. (For more on DOIs, see CMOS 13.7.)
Bitly et al.
Any URL can be radically shortened via a service like Bitly. For example, the URL for the mass-market Pocket Books edition of The Great Gatsby at Simon & Schuster could be rendered as https://bit.ly/3r6H30U (linked here for your convenience).
That’s very useful in many scenarios, but there’s an obvious disadvantage to such a link. Readers can’t tell from the text of the link alone what it is or where it might lead. That’s one of the reasons Chicago recommends against using third-party link-shortening services for URLs in source citations (see CMOS 13.11).
HTTPS and WWW
Another thing you can do if needed—for any URL—is to omit the protocol (usually “https://”—for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure), which browsers usually supply by default. In source citations, Chicago recommends leaving it in, partly because when you copy and paste a URL from the address bar in your browser, the protocol gets carried with it. But in other contexts, you can often leave it out.
In many cases, you can also omit “www.” along with the protocol from a URL that includes those letters. For example, https://www.apple.com/** can be referred to as Apple.com (with a capital A; domain names aren’t case sensitive).
🔗 🔗 🔗
Whatever you do, check any edited URL to make sure it still works as intended.
* If you must display such a URL (or any URL) in print or PDF, you can improve its appearance by adding end-of-line break points in the form of zero-width spaces (see CMOS 7.47 for details). In HTML, another option is to use the <wbr> tag (as described in § 4.5.28 of the HTML Living Standard, which is maintained by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, or WHATWG).
† For an even shorter URL, you could get rid of the part with the title and author and use https://www.amazon.com/dp/1982146702. That link still works as intended, but it no longer tells human readers what it points to.
‡ For an example featuring a URL from Google Books, see CMOS 13.9.
** For the trailing slash, which often appears with a URL copied from an address bar (in which case it can usually be retained), see CMOS 6.120.
Browser address bar photo by deberarr / Adobe Stock.
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