When you have no author and no page number, you don’t panic. You just use the first chunk of the full Works Cited entry. Usually, that’s the article title or the webpage title.
Think of it like a game of telephone, but with citations. Instead of saying “Smith says,” you say “The article says.” And since there are no pages, you just… don’t include them. Simple, right?
Let’s get specific. What does this look like in the middle of your paper? You’ll put the title (or a shortened version) in quotation marks. Or you’ll use italics if it’s a whole website.
Scenario One: The Article Title
Let’s say you found a blog post called “Why Cats Are Better Than Pizza.” No author listed. No page numbers (because it’s a webpage). How do you cite it in-text?
You write: You would be surprised to learn that cats outrank pizza in global satisfaction surveys (“Why Cats Are Better Than Pizza”). See? The title becomes your stand-in author.
But what if the title is super long? Like, “An Exhaustive Study of the Feline-Pizza Paradigm and Its Implications for Modern Snacking Behavior”? Shorten it! Just use the first few words that make sense.
For example: The study claims cats are superior to all forms of Italian cuisine (“An Exhaustive Study”). Nobody will hunt you down for cutting a title short. It’s allowed. Relax.
Scenario Two: The Whole Website
Maybe your source isn’t a single article. Maybe it’s a whole website’s homepage. Like, say, the website of the International Cat Lovers Association. No author. No pages.
Then you use the website name in italics. In-text, it looks like this: According to the International Cat Lovers Association, cats demand at least three naps per day.
Notice no page number? Yep. We move on with our lives. The reader knows you’re talking about the whole darn website.
