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WorldFactbooks

How to Cite the World Factbook (After the Shutdown)

Published

The CIA removed The World Factbook from cia.gov on February 4, 2026. Every Factbook URL on the site, whether it dates from 2007 or 2025, now returns a 302 redirect to a single farewell story page. That means every citation in every paper, syllabus, library guide, and Wikipedia article that points at cia.gov no longer leads to the cited content.

This guide covers three things: why your existing citations break, how to cite the archived CIA pages correctly, and how to cite the live pages on this site. If you just want a ready-made citation, our citation fixer accepts any old cia.gov Factbook URL and generates APA, MLA, and Chicago citations automatically, pointed at the correct archived snapshot.

Why old Factbook citations break

A citation to the Factbook typically includes a cia.gov URL in one of two forms:

  • 2007-2021 (the “geos” era): https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/in.html. This form appears in most university library guides and older academic work, because it was the site’s address for 13.5 years.
  • 2021-2026 (the “slug” era): https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/india/. This form dominates recent work and Wikipedia references.

Both forms now redirect to the same generic farewell page. The redirect discards the country and topic entirely: a reader following your citation for India’s population lands on a story about the Factbook’s history, with no way to reach the data you cited. The CIA published no official archive, and no government body (GPO or NARA) took over hosting.

The content itself survives. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine holds roughly 29,000 snapshots of Factbook pages going back to January 2017, plus older captures, and the final edition (last content update January 22, 2026) is preserved in several independent mirrors. The fix is to repoint your citation at a preserved copy.

Citing the archived CIA page via the Wayback Machine

For academic work, the archived CIA page is usually the right citation target: it is the exact document you (or your source) originally read, frozen at a known date.

Step 1: Find the right snapshot

Take your dead cia.gov URL and prepend a Wayback prefix with a timestamp. For India’s page as it stood on December 1, 2020:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201201000000/https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/in.html

The 14-digit number is a timestamp (YYYYMMDDhhmmss). The Wayback Machine serves the snapshot closest to that date. Choose a timestamp near the date you actually consulted the page, or near the date of the edition you are citing.

One warning if you are reconstructing a URL rather than repairing one: pre-2021 Factbook URLs use GEC country codes, not the ISO codes most people know. The overlaps are treacherous. In Factbook URLs, ch is China (not Switzerland), gm is Germany (not Gambia), ja is Japan, and kr is Kiribati (not South Korea). If you guess codes from ISO habits, you will cite the wrong country. Our citation fixer resolves these codes correctly for every entity.

Step 2: Format the citation

Worked examples for the India snapshot above. In each case the date is the snapshot date (December 1, 2020), the author is the Central Intelligence Agency, and the container is The World Factbook.

APA 7:

Central Intelligence Agency. (2020, December 1). India. The World Factbook. https://web.archive.org/web/20201201000000/https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/in.html

APA 7 treats an archived page as a stable source, so no retrieval date is needed: the snapshot cannot change.

MLA 9:

“India.” The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, 1 Dec. 2020, web.archive.org/web/20201201000000/https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/in.html.

MLA permits noting the original URL as well; if your instructor wants it, append “Originally published at www.cia.gov.”

Chicago 17 (bibliography):

Central Intelligence Agency. “India.” The World Factbook. December 1, 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20201201000000/https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/in.html.

Chicago 17 (footnote):

  1. Central Intelligence Agency, “India,” The World Factbook, December 1, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20201201000000/https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/in.html.

The same patterns work for any country and any era of Factbook URL: swap the page title, the snapshot date, and the URL.

Citing our live pages

WorldFactbooks continues the Factbook’s country-profile format with data refreshed from live statistical sources (see our methodology and sources pages for what feeds each field). Because our pages update, cite them like any live website: include an access date, and treat WorldFactbooks, not the CIA, as the publisher.

APA 7:

WorldFactbooks. (n.d.). India. Retrieved August 11, 2026, from https://worldfactbooks.com/country/india/

MLA 9:

“India.” WorldFactbooks, worldfactbooks.com/country/india/. Accessed 11 Aug. 2026.

Chicago 17 (bibliography):

WorldFactbooks. “India.” Accessed August 11, 2026. https://worldfactbooks.com/country/india/.

Do not attribute our live figures to the CIA. The underlying archive is CIA material (public domain under 17 U.S.C. 105), but refreshed values come from other statistical sources, and a citation should name what you actually used.

Archived or live: which should you cite?

Cite the archived CIA page when:

  • You are repairing an existing citation. The original claim was drawn from a specific CIA edition; the honest fix points at that edition, not at newer data that may differ.
  • Your claim is time-bound (“India’s population in 2020 was…”). The snapshot is the evidence.
  • Your publisher, journal, or instructor expects a government source. The Wayback copy is the CIA’s own text, byte for byte.
  • You need permanence. A Wayback snapshot will read the same in ten years.

Cite a live page when:

  • You need a current figure, not a historical one. The final CIA edition froze in January 2026; its estimates (mostly 2023-2025 vintage) age from here on.
  • You are writing something that will be read against present-day facts, such as journalism or teaching materials, where a frozen leader name or exchange rate would mislead.

Other archives worth knowing: the factbook.json project preserves the final edition as CC0 JSON (best for citing data programmatically), and worldfactbookarchive.org preserves 36 editions from 1990-2025 with export tools (best for citing a specific historical edition). Both are solid citation targets for their respective uses; see our archive explainer for how they compare.

The fast path

If you have a dead cia.gov link, paste it into /fix-citation/. The tool identifies the country and era from the URL (including the tricky pre-2021 country codes), finds a working Wayback snapshot, and outputs ready-to-paste APA 7, MLA 9, and Chicago 17 citations, plus a link to the country’s current profile page if you want the live data instead.

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