How to Cite a Source With No Author, No Date or No Page Number (n.d., Anonymous, para.)

A web page with no byline, a PDF with no date, a report with no page numbers: sources like these turn up in almost every dissertation and term paper. Each case has a standard fix, n.d., para., the title in the author slot. Before you reach for one, though, take a second look. More often than not the information isn’t missing at all, it just isn’t where you looked first.

This guide covers where to find the missing details, which placeholder each style expects, and how to get Zotero to handle it for you.

A note before we start: the sample sources below (“Example City Council”, addresses on example.org) are made up and only show the format.

First, check the information is really missing

A placeholder tells your reader: “I looked, and this doesn’t exist.” That should be true. Check these places before you write n.d. or Anonymous:

• About page, imprint, contact page: Websites without a byline almost always say who is responsible for the content somewhere. That’s your author.
• Group authors: A government agency, a university department, a charity or a company can be an author. “Office for National Statistics (2024)” is a complete citation, not a workaround.
• PDF document properties: Every PDF reader shows them (File → Properties). You’ll often find a title, an author and a creation date there. Be careful with the date: it is sometimes just the day the file was exported, not the day it was published. Only use it if it fits the content.
• Title page and footer: Reports often give a version, a “last updated” date or a copyright year in small print on the back of the title page or in the footer.
• Library catalogues and publisher pages: For books and reports, a catalogue record or the publisher’s page will usually give the place, publisher and year even when the document itself doesn’t.
• Wayback Machine: web.archive.org shows when a page was first archived. That isn’t a publication date, but it is solid evidence for an estimated date (more on that below).

Only when none of this turns anything up do you use a placeholder.

No author: group author, then title

The order is the same in every major style:

1. Use the organisation. If no person is named but an organisation is responsible for the text, it becomes the author: (Example City Council, 2024).
2. Move the title to the author position. If there is neither a person nor an organisation, APA 7 puts the title first, both in the reference list and in the citation: (Cycling in Winter, 2023). Alphabetise the entry by its title, ignoring a leading “A”, “An” or “The”.
3. Use the title in the citation as it appears in the reference. Titles that are italicised in the reference (books, reports, stand-alone web pages) stay italicised in the text. Titles of parts of a larger work (articles, chapters, a page on a news site) go in quotation marks: (“Bike Lanes Closed,” 2023).

Two things to avoid:

• “Anonymous” only belongs in your citation when the work is actually signed “Anonymous”. APA 7 is explicit about this: a missing author is not an anonymous one.
• “n.a.” isn’t part of any major style. If it shows up in your reference list, it almost always came in through a bad import (see the Zotero section).

For more on web pages in general, see citing internet sources.

No date: n.d.

When a source has no publication date, write n.d. (no date) where the year would go, in the text and in the reference list: (Example City Council, n.d.). APA 7 and Chicago both use n.d. Some Harvard guides, including Cite Them Right, spell it out as (no date).

If you can estimate the date from other evidence, such as a Wayback snapshot, an event the page mentions or the date of the data it uses, put it in square brackets so it’s clear the date comes from you and not from the source: [2019] or [ca. 2019]. In APA 7, stick with n.d. unless the date is genuinely established. APA uses “ca.” mainly for archival material.

For undated web pages, add the date you accessed the page. APA 7 only asks for a retrieval date when the content is designed to change over time and you aren’t linking to an archived version: “Retrieved October 20, 2026, from …”. Harvard and MLA guides typically include an access date for web sources as a matter of course.

The rest of the APA rules are in our APA 7 citation guide.

No page number: paragraph, section or time stamp

For a paraphrase, author and date are usually enough. A direct quotation needs a locator, though, and without a page number you have a few options:

• Paragraph number: (Example City Council, n.d., para. 4). APA 7 explicitly allows you to count the paragraphs yourself if they aren’t numbered.
• Section heading: (Example City Council, n.d., Winter Maintenance section). You can shorten a long heading, and you can combine it with a paragraph number within that section.
• Time stamp for audio and video: (Cuddy, 2012, 2:12), pointing to where the quotation starts. More in our post on citing podcasts, videos and social media.

APA 7 doesn’t use “n.p.” for a missing page number, and Kindle location numbers don’t count as page numbers. MLA 9 only uses “par.” when the source itself numbers its paragraphs; otherwise it leaves the locator out.

PDF page or printed page?

A classic trap: your PDF reader says “page 14 of 80”, but the page itself is numbered 12 because the front matter is in Roman numerals or not numbered at all. Always cite the page number printed on the page. That’s the one your reader can find in any copy. If the PDF has no printed page numbers, use a paragraph or section, not the viewer’s count.

No place or publisher

APA 7 dropped the publisher location altogether, and there’s no placeholder for a missing publisher; the element is simply left out. Chicago uses n.p. for “no place” or “no publisher”. Harvard guides differ: some use [s.l.] and [s.n.], others just leave the element out. Follow the guide your department uses and apply it consistently.

Comparison: APA 7, Harvard, Chicago and MLA 9

The examples use a made-up web page from “Example City Council” and a made-up book. Harvard varies between institutions; the column shows a common form based on Cite Them Right, not the only correct one.

For the basics of author-date referencing, see our Harvard referencing guide. For shortening repeat footnotes, see ibid., op. cit. and loc. cit.

Writing in German or citing German sources?

German-language guides use their own abbreviations, and you’ll see them in German sources too: o. V. (ohne Verfasser, no author), o. J. (ohne Jahr, no date), o. S. (ohne Seite, no page) and o. O. (ohne Ort, no place). Watch out for o. V.: some guides use it for “no publisher” (ohne Verlag) instead. If you’re writing at a German-speaking university, follow the local guide rather than the English conventions above.

Zotero: leave fields empty, fix bad imports

A reference manager will add the placeholders for you, as long as you let it:

• Leave the field empty. Don’t type “n.d.” into the Date field or “Anonymous” into the Author field. CSL citation styles generate the right placeholder from an empty field, in the language of the style: n.d. in English, o. J. in German. A typed “Anonymous” is treated as a real name and sorted under A.
• Enter organisations as a single name. Switch the creator field to single-field mode (the toggle next to the name). Otherwise Zotero turns “Office for National Statistics” into a first name “Office for National” and a surname “Statistics”.
• Check what the connector imported. The browser connector takes whatever metadata the page offers, and that’s often wrong. Typical problems: an author called “n.a.” or “admin”, the site name entered as a person, or today’s date as the publication date. The day you read the page belongs in the Accessed field, not in Date.

More practical setup advice is in our Zotero workflow tips.

When to replace the source instead

A missing author isn’t a reason to drop a source on its own. Government pages and reports from professional bodies are perfectly fine under a group author. It gets problematic when the gaps add up: no author, no publisher, no date, no references. At that point your reader can neither place the claim nor check it.

That’s where the question from citable vs. worth citing comes in: you can cite it, but does it actually support your point? You can often find the same information in a source with a clear author, for example the study the anonymous page is based on, or a report from the responsible agency. For reports, working papers and government publications, see our guide to citing grey literature.

Common mistakes

• Anonymous or “no author” when the About page names the organisation. The most common one. The organisation is the author.
• Placeholders typed into Zotero by hand. They sort wrongly and leave you with mixed forms when you switch styles.
• The access date used as the publication year. “Example City Council (2026)” for a page you read in 2026 that may be years older.
• An estimated year without brackets. Writing “2019” claims that the year appears in the source.
• The PDF page instead of the printed page. Your reader ends up two or three pages away from the quotation.
• Inconsistent placeholders. n.d. in one entry, (no date) in the next, or o. J. and n.d. side by side.
• “n.a.” or “Anon.” for a source that isn’t signed that way. No major style uses either for an unsigned work.

The short version

Missing details are usually a research problem, not a citation-rules problem: the About page, the document properties, a library catalogue and the Wayback Machine close most of the gaps. When something really is missing, use your style’s placeholder, leave the field empty in Zotero, and keep the same form throughout your paper.

See an example: A prefilled example shows how the check flags entries with incomplete or wrongly imported details. Check a sample citation →

For the content check, upload your thesis and the sources you cite to Acurio. It matches every claim against the passage you point to, including in sources without page numbers.