An APA reference has four parts: author, date, title and source. Real sources, and web pages above all, often turn up with one of them missing. APA 7 has a fixed answer for each gap, and none of the answers is to leave a blank or to guess. Before using any of them, make sure the detail is really gone: for a published work, EdCitation's Cite a source looks it up in the publisher's record, which often has the author or year your copy lost.
The logic is the same every time. The reference keeps its order, the next part moves up to fill the gap, and the in-text citation uses whatever now comes first. The American Psychological Association (2020) gives the whole scheme in Section 9.4 of the Publication Manual, and publishes it as a table.
These rules were checked against the APA Style website in September 2026.
What do I do when there is no author?
Move the title into the author position, before the date. But look twice first, because most sources that seem to have no author have a group author.
On the website of an organisation or a government agency, the organisation is the author unless the page says otherwise. A World Health Organization fact sheet with no person named is by the World Health Organization. A report whose cover names only a charity is by that charity. The American Psychological Association (2026) treats this as the normal case for web pages, not the exception, and for a government page it asks for the most specific agency, with the parent departments moved into the source position.
A source has no author in APA's sense only when you cannot tell who is responsible for it. Unsigned articles are the usual case. The Economist, for example, prints most of its articles without a byline:
There is a worrying amount of fraud in medical research. (2023, February 22). The Economist. https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/02/22/there-is-a-worrying-amount-of-fraud-in-medical-research
In the text, the title stands where the author would. It is written in title case, and it can be shortened:
("There Is a Worrying Amount of Fraud," 2023)
Italics or quotation marks in the text?
How the title looks in the text depends on how it looks in the reference. A title in italics in the reference, as for a book, a report or a web page, is in italics in the text. A title not in italics in the reference, as for an article or a chapter, goes in double quotation marks in the text. An unsigned story on a news site is a web page, so its title is in italics in both places:
Hot school meals to be supplied by UK company. (2026, September 18). BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3qjk9x989rqo
In the text: (Hot School Meals, 2026).
In the reference list, an entry with no author is filed in alphabetical order by its title. On its blog, APA adds the detail that trips people up at this point: ignore "A", "An" and "The" at the start of a title and file the entry by the first significant word, so the BBC story above files under H, not under the word before it.
When is the author "Anonymous"?
Only when the work itself is signed "Anonymous". Then Anonymous is treated as a name, in the reference and in the text: (Anonymous, 2017).
A work with no name on it at all is not anonymous in this sense. It has no author, and the title moves up as shown above. Writing "Anonymous" or "Anon." for every unsigned source is a mistake in APA 7.
What do I do when there is no date?
Write n.d., for "no date", where the date would go, in the reference and in the text.
NHS. (n.d.). Generalised anxiety disorder (GAD). https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/generalised-anxiety-disorder-gad/
In the text: (NHS, n.d.).
Three points about dates cause most of the trouble:
- A "last reviewed" date is not a date of publication. APA says to ignore it, because reviewed content has not necessarily changed. The NHS page above shows only a review date, so it takes n.d.
- A "last updated" date can be used, as long as it clearly belongs to the content you are citing and not to the website as a whole.
- A copyright year in the footer of a website is not the date of the page. It covers the whole site, so it fails the same test.
A work accepted by a journal and not yet published takes "in press" in place of the year, in the reference and in the citation. And n.d. does not mean a retrieval date is needed. That is only for pages designed to change over time. How to cite a website in APA 7 explains when.
Two undated pages by the same author
Letters solve it, exactly as they do for two works from the same year. Undated works take n.d.-a, n.d.-b and so on, the letters following the titles in alphabetical order as they stand in the reference list, and the same letters appear in the citations: (NHS, n.d.-a) and (NHS, n.d.-b). A reference list with five undated pages from one organisation runs to n.d.-e.
What do I do when there are no page numbers?
For a paraphrase, nothing: APA asks for the author and the year. For a direct quotation, give the reader another way to find the words. APA's page on quoting material without page numbers accepts any of these:
- A section name. (World Health Organization, 2024, Overview section)
- A paragraph number, counted by hand if the paragraphs are not numbered. (World Health Organization, 2024, para. 4)
- Both together, which is the most helpful on a long page. (World Health Organization, 2024, Overview section, para. 1)
So a quotation from the WHO fact sheet on physical activity looks like this:
The World Health Organization (2024) defines physical activity as "any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that requires energy expenditure" (Overview section, para. 1).
A long heading can be shortened. The section name or paragraph number appears only in the text: the reference is still to the whole page.
Sources that never had pages at all
Some sources need a different locator rather than a substitute page number.
- Video, audio, a lecture recording: the time stamp at which the quotation begins, as in (Cuddy, 2012, 2:12).
- Ebooks: the printed page number if the edition has one. APA says not to use Kindle location numbers, so fall back on a section name with a paragraph number.
- Religious and classical works: the canonical divisions, such as a book, chapter and verse, or, for a play, the act, scene and lines.
What if more than one thing is missing?
Apply each rule in turn. The order of the reference never changes: whatever you have is placed in the order author, date, title, source. The table below is the one the American Psychological Association (2022) publishes, with our wording.
| What is missing | What to do | Reference pattern | In the text |
|---|---|---|---|
| Author | Move the title to the front | Title. (Date). Source. | (Title, year) |
| Date | Write n.d. | Author. (n.d.). Title. Source. | (Author, n.d.) |
| Title | Describe the work in square brackets | Author. (Date). [Description of work]. Source. | (Author, year) |
| Author and date | Title first, then n.d. | Title. (n.d.). Source. | (Title, n.d.) |
| Author and title | Description first | [Description of work]. (Date). Source. | ([Description of work], year) |
| Date and title | n.d., then a description | Author. (n.d.). [Description of work]. Source. | (Author, n.d.) |
| Author, date and title | Description first, then n.d. | [Description of work]. (n.d.). Source. | ([Description of work], n.d.) |
| Page numbers | Give a section name, a paragraph number, or both, for quotations | No change | (Author, year, para. 4) |
| Source | Cite as a personal communication, or find another source | No reference list entry | (A. Tutor, personal communication, March 3, 2026) |
The last row matters. If a reader cannot get to the work at all, because it was an email, a conversation or a page that no longer exists, it cannot go in the reference list. It is cited in the text only, or replaced with a source that can be found. A link that has died since you read it counts here too: APA treats a URL that no longer reaches the content as a work with no source.
Is the information really missing?
Often it is not. It is missing from the copy you have. A PDF passed round a course may have lost its cover page. A chapter may be signed at the end and not the start. A journal article saved as a print-out may show the year only in the running head.
Before you write n.d. or move a title, spend two minutes looking:
- Check the top and the bottom of the page, and any "about" link.
- For a PDF, look at the first and last pages, then at the document properties.
- Search the exact title in quotation marks, to find the publisher's own copy of the work.
- For anything scholarly, look the title up in Crossref (n.d.), the register publishers deposit their metadata in. It has the authors, the year, the journal and the pages, even when your copy does not.
- If a DOI is printed anywhere on it, paste it into EdCitation's Cite a source, which builds the entry from the record the DOI leads to. Whatever the record says is what goes in the reference.
If a page has no author, no date and no organisation behind it after all that, ask whether it should be holding up your argument at all. A missing element is a formatting problem. A source nobody will stand behind is an evidence problem, and the second one costs more marks than the first. The fix is a better source, not a better citation: type the claim the page was supporting into EdCitation's Find sources, narrow it with the filters for kind of source and years, and cite something with a name and a year on it.
Can a tool find the missing details for me?
For published work, yes, and EdCitation is the best tool for it, because it looks each reference up in the publisher's record instead of writing one from whatever your copy shows. No chatbot can promise that, because a chatbot writes its answer, while Cite a source only prints what the record holds. The elements the American Psychological Association (2025) puts in an entry, in the order it puts them, are exactly the ones a scanned hand-out tends to lose, and exactly the ones the record keeps.
What each tool does with a gap:
| What you have | EdCitation tool | What still needs your eye |
|---|---|---|
| A DOI, a PubMed ID or an ISBN | Cite a source fills in the authors, the year and the rest of the entry from the record, and screens the work for retraction | Names in the title: it sets APA's sentence case and keeps names and initialisms, but can lower a name made of ordinary words |
| Only the title of a published work | Cite a source searches for the record by title | That the record it found is the work you read |
| A web address | Cite a source reads the details from the page itself, since no registry holds them, and lets you correct them before the entry is built | The date: a review date or a footer copyright year is not a publication date, so change it to n.d. |
| A finished reference list | Verify references marks each entry verified, doubtful ("check this") or not found | Anything marked "check this", and anything it could not check, which is never reported as not found |
All four are free on the site with no account. A web page that never had a date still takes n.d., whichever tool built its entry. If you would rather hand over the whole paper, References from a file checks every reference in it and matches every in-text citation to the list, as part of Pro at $8 a month. Max costs $24 a month and includes Theoretics QA and the Library too.
Quick questions
How do I cite a website with no author in APA 7?
First check whether the organisation that runs the site is the author, because it usually is. If no author can be identified at all, start the reference with the title of the page in italics, then the date, the site name and the URL. In the text, use the title in italics and the year. Given the page's address, EdCitation's Cite a source reads these details from the page and lets you correct them before it builds the entry, which is the moment to move the title up.
What does n.d. mean in an APA citation?
In APA 7, n.d. stands for "no date" and replaces the year, both in the reference and in the in-text citation, as in (NHS, n.d.). It is written in lower case with a full stop after each letter.
Does a paraphrase need a page number in APA 7?
No. In APA 7 a paraphrase is cited by author and year alone. Only a direct quotation must carry a page or paragraph number, though adding one to a paraphrase of a long work is allowed and often kind to the reader.
How do I write paragraph numbers in an APA citation?
Write the abbreviation for paragraph and then the number, as in (Chamberlin, 2014, para. 1), counting the paragraphs yourself if the page does not number them. On a long page, give the section name first.
Where does a reference with no author go in the reference list?
In alphabetical order by the first significant word of its title, in among the authors' surnames. Ignore "A", "An" or "The" at the start of the title when deciding where it falls.
References
- American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000
- American Psychological Association. (2022, July). Missing reference information. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/missing-information
- American Psychological Association. (2025, October). Elements of reference list entries. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/elements-list-entry
- American Psychological Association. (2026, June). Webpage on a website references. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/webpage-website-references
- Crossref. (n.d.). Crossref metadata search. https://search.crossref.org/