Most of the information I have gathered is from trusted websites and articles online. I have referenced to a few actual books but most of the sources or from the Web. Do you need to use a proper reference format to cite online sources? Also, do you manually cite your sources in your documents?
Is this like an academic type of book or fiction? If it's academic, you would definitely need to compile any sources you use into a bibliography or Works Cited, depending on the format you're going to use. You would probably want to use in text citations as well. And if you plan to sell it, you would probably need authorization to use any quotes. If it's fiction, then citations would break up the flow, and I do not believe that you would need to cite your research unless there were direct quotes, in which case you would probably need authorization to use anyway.
if it's non-fiction, sources must be cited properly regardless of whether from print or online media... i don't know what you could mean by 'manually'... how else could it be done? if you're writing fiction, only direct quotes need to be attributed [where they appear], though novelists will often give credit to their research sources, on an 'acknowledgement' page...
Okay thanks. And by manually, I mean formatting it in the manuscript without using Microsoft Word's 'auto' citation and bibliography. I want to cite the sources by numbers and include them in order (by citation number) in the 'Works Cited' section.
What kind of sources are you talking about? Blogs? Organization web sites? My evidence radar goes off when someone says "trusted websites". Organizations and people can have trustable websites. Opinions from blogs can be legitimate sources, Jonathan Turley's legal opinions, Phil Plait's astronomy blog, the American Heart Association's medical recommendations, APICs infection control position statements and so on. But websites? Whose?
For academic writing, for example the MLA guide. It's okay that most of your sources are from the web, and you can discuss their 'trustworthiness' in the discussion part and how it may affect the reliability of your results. If you've used Ebsco, JSTOR, etc. you of course cite the journal/paper. If it's a webpage, follow the guideline and be consistent.
