How to Cite a Source With No Author in APA 7

To cite a source with no author in APA 7, move the title of the work into the author position of the reference, followed by the date. In the in-text citation, use the title (shortened if it is long) in place of the author's name. That is the whole rule; the difficulty is everything around it, because most sources that look authorless actually have an author you have missed, and the formatting of the title in the in-text citation changes depending on the type of source.

This guide covers the official rule, the check you should run before applying it, and worked examples for the cases students actually hit: webpages, dictionaries, Wikipedia, religious texts, works signed "Anonymous," and sources missing a date as well as an author.

The Official APA 7 Rule

Table 9.1 of the APA Publication Manual (7th ed., Section 9.4, p. 284) sets out how to build a reference when information is missing. When the author is missing, the instruction is short: provide the title in the author position, then the date and the source.

Format:

Title of work. (Year). Source. URL

Filled-in example (a print reference book with no listed author):

Merriam-Webster's collegiate dictionary (11th ed.). (2003). Merriam-Webster.

Two things shift when the title takes the author position:

• The reference is alphabetized by title. Ignore A, An, and The when deciding where it sorts. The care and keeping of you files under C.
• The in-text citation uses the title instead of an author surname. Section 8.14 of the manual (pp. 264-265) governs this, and it is where most formatting errors happen. The next sections cover it in detail.

One warning before the examples. Do not write "Anonymous" as the author just because no name appears. APA reserves Anonymous for works that are literally signed that way. Using it for an ordinary unsigned webpage is one of the most common mistakes in student reference lists, and it changes how the reader looks the source up.

First, Check the Source Really Has No Author

"No author" does not mean no person's name on the page. It means no responsible author of any kind can be identified, and that includes organizations. APA treats companies, government agencies, universities, and nonprofits as group authors: they go in the author position exactly as a person would.

Most webpages that students cite as authorless fail this check. The CDC page with no byline is authored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The code of ethics on the National Association of Social Workers site is authored by the National Association of Social Workers. A university library video making exactly this point walks through the NASW example: no person is named anywhere on the page, and the correct reference still starts with the organization, because the organization is responsible for the content.

Run this check in order:

1. Look for a byline at the top or bottom of the page, and on a linked "About this article" panel.
2. Look for a responsible organization. If the content is published by the site owner and the site owner is an identifiable organization, that organization is the author. This is the usual answer for government documents, agency reports, and institutional webpages.
3. Check whether author and site name match. When they do, APA drops the site name from the reference to avoid repeating it (Section 9.28). See our APA 7 website citation guide for that pattern.
4. Only if steps 1-3 fail do you have a genuinely authorless work, and the title moves up.

Genuinely authorless sources do exist: reference works compiled by a publisher's staff, Wikipedia articles, old texts, unsigned editorials, pamphlets, and works published anonymously. Those are the cases in the examples below.

Worked Examples

1. Book or Reference Work With No Author

The classic case is a dictionary or manual compiled without named authors or editors.

Reference:

Merriam-Webster's collegiate dictionary (11th ed.). (2003). Merriam-Webster.

In-text, parenthetical: (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 2003)

In-text, narrative: Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (2003) defines it as...

The title is italicized in the in-text citation because it is italicized in the reference, and it switches to title case in the text even though the reference uses sentence case. Both details are easy to miss. For books that do have authors, the element order is covered in our APA 7 book citation guide.

2. Wikipedia Article

Wikipedia articles have no listed author, so the article title leads the reference. APA's own example uses a real article:

List of oldest companies. (2019, January 13). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_oldest_companies&oldid=...

In-text: ("List of Oldest Companies," 2019)

The date is the date of the version you read, and the URL should point to that archived version. Open the article's View history tab and copy the link for the specific revision; that keeps your citation stable even after the article is edited. The title takes quotation marks in text because it sits inside a larger work (Wikipedia) and is unitalicized in the reference.

3. Webpage With No Author

If a webpage truly has no person and no organization behind it, the pattern is:

Title of page. (Year, Month Day). Site Name. URL

In-text: ("Title of Page," Year)

In practice, pause before using this pattern. If the site name and the responsible organization are the same thing, you have a group author, and the reference should start with the organization instead. The authorless-webpage pattern is for content on sites where the operator is unidentifiable or clearly did not produce the content.

4. Religious Work

Religious texts are usually cited without an author. APA's official example:

King James Bible. (2017). King James Bible Online. https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/ (Original work published 1769)

In-text: (King James Bible, 1769/2017)

The republication rule applies here: the original publication year and the year of the version you used both appear in the in-text citation, separated by a slash. The same structure works for the Torah, the Quran, and classical works such as Beowulf, where the translation or edition you read supplies the recent date.

5. Work Signed "Anonymous"

This is the one case where Anonymous belongs in the author position. The novel Primary Colors was published with "Anonymous" printed on the cover, so Anonymous is treated as the author's name:

Anonymous. (1996). Primary colors: A novel of politics. Random House.

In-text: (Anonymous, 1996)

The reference is alphabetized under A, as if Anonymous were a surname. If the work is merely unsigned, this format is wrong; use the title-first format instead.

6. Unsigned Article in a Magazine or Newspaper

Unsigned news items and editorials keep the article title in the author position. The manual's own in-text example for an unsigned magazine article is ("Understanding Sensory Memory," 2018): quotation marks, title case, year. The reference follows the normal periodical pattern with the title moved up:

Title of article. (Year, Month Day). Publication Name. URL

For signed newspaper pieces, the reference follows the standard periodical format; the only change for unsigned ones is the missing author.

7. Brochure or Pamphlet With No Author

Brochures are the case that sends people searching mid-assignment, because they often carry no byline, no date, and no page numbers. If no organization is identifiable either:

Title of brochure [Brochure]. (n.d.).

In-text: (Title of Brochure, n.d.)

The bracketed format description [Brochure] is part of the title element. Most real brochures do have a group author (the clinic, the agency, the museum), so run the author check first.

In-Text Citations When the Title Stands In for the Author

Section 8.14 gives three rules for the title that replaces the author, and each one trips people up:

1. Match the formatting of the reference. If the title is italicized in the reference (books, reports, brochures, whole websites, periodicals), italicize it in the in-text citation. If it is unitalicized in the reference (articles, chapters, webpages, dictionary entries), wrap it in double quotation marks in text.

2. Use title case in text. References use sentence case (only the first word, proper nouns, and the word after a colon capitalized). In-text citations flip to title case: capitalize all major words. The same title appears as Merriam-Webster's collegiate dictionary in the reference and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary in the text.

3. Shorten long titles. Use the first few words, enough for the reader to find the entry in your reference list. "APA in-text citation with no author: A guide for first-year students" becomes ("APA In-Text Citation," 2024). Keep the first word intact so the shortened form still alphabetizes to the right entry.

The comma placement follows the closing quotation mark rule: the comma before the year goes inside the quotation marks ("Understanding Sensory Memory," 2018). With italics, the comma follows the title normally.

For the general mechanics of parenthetical and narrative citations across every author count, see the complete guide to in-text citations.

Special Cases

No Author and No Date

Combine the two missing-information rules: title in the author position, n.d. (for "no date") in the date position.

Title of work. (n.d.). Site Name. URL

In-text: (Title of Work, n.d.) or ("Title of Work," n.d.)

The period pattern matters: lowercase n, period, lowercase d, period. Autocorrect regularly turns it into "N.D." or "n.d" and both are wrong.

No Author, No Date, No Title

The worst case. Table 9.1 handles it: describe the work in square brackets where the title would go, unitalicized.

[Description of the work]. (n.d.). Source.

In-text: ([Description of the work], n.d.)

Keep the description short and specific: [Photograph of the Reichstag under construction], [Untitled community flyer on tenant rights]. If a source is missing this much information, also ask whether it is strong enough to cite at all; a work you cannot identify is a work your reader cannot check.

Two No-Author Works With the Same Title and Year

Treat them the way you would two works by the same author in the same year: add lowercase letters after the year, assigned in the order the references appear in your list. With dates, that gives (Title, 2023a) and (Title, 2023b). With no dates, APA hyphenates: (Title, n.d.-a) and (Title, n.d.-b).

Alphabetizing No-Author References

Sort by the first significant word of the title, skipping A, An, and The. The entry keeps its initial article in the reference itself; only the sorting ignores it. So The state of food security sorts under S but still prints with The at the front. Works signed Anonymous sort under A, by the word Anonymous.

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

• Writing "Anonymous" for any unsigned source. It looks tidy and it is wrong. Anonymous is only for works signed Anonymous; everything else uses the title-first format. The fix is mechanical: if the word Anonymous does not appear on the work, it does not appear in your reference.
• Missing a group author. The most common version of this mistake is citing a CDC, WHO, or corporate page title-first because no person is named. Organizations are authors in APA. Check the site owner before declaring a source authorless.
• Using the URL or site name as the author. Neither belongs in the author position. The site name has its own slot later in the reference, and the URL always comes last.
• Keeping sentence case in the in-text citation. The reference reads List of oldest companies; the in-text citation reads "List of Oldest Companies." Students who copy the reference title into their paragraph get this backwards, and it is exactly the kind of small error a grader scans for.
• Wrong wrapper on the title. Quotation marks on a book title, italics on an article title. Check what the reference does and mirror it.
• Writing "n.a." for no author. APA has no such abbreviation. The title-first format is the whole mechanism; nothing marks the absence of the author.
• Trusting an old template. Threads on r/SNHU are full of students handed APA 6 templates (running heads and all) years into APA 7. If your course materials conflict with the current manual, ask the instructor which edition they grade against, and check disputed rules at apastyle.apa.org, which is the authoritative source.

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