Do think carefully before making use of websites for legal academic research. Make sure that you are satisfied that the source is sufficiently credible as an academic resource. Websites with .gov.uk will generally be reliable. You should cite printed materials in favour of materials from a website.
Search engines are not legal sources and so you should not be citing www.google.com in your bibliography.
In a similar vein the names of subscription services such as 'Westlaw' are not suitable references to include in your bibliography. You will need to refer to the particular document (case, statute or journal article) which you retrieved from the subscription service. Remember that search engines and subscription services are your tools to get the information, but they are not in themselves the reference for that information.
Wikipedia should not be cited as a reference in essays. Remember that the content of Wikipedia can be altered by individuals across the world and you should not rely on it as an authoritative source of accurate legal information.
When citing websites follow the following formula as best you can, e.g. Author, 'Title of Page', Title of Website, Date <web address> date accessed
An example of a website reference is as follows:
Land Registry Practice Guide, April 2009 <http://www1.landregistry.gov.uk/assets/library/documents/lrpg001.pdf> accessed 25 June 2009
If there is no author or date for the web page, you can leave these out, but you must always include the Title, web address and date accessed.
There is a very useful online tutorial which will help you to assess which online resources are relevant to use in assignments. This is available at: