APA 7 Citations for Web Pages With No Author, No Date or No Title

A web page reference has four parts: author, date, title and source. In APA 7 the shape is Author. (Year, Month Day). Title of page in italics. Site Name. URL. Each part answers a question: who is responsible, when was it published, what is it called and where can the reader find it. When a part is missing, you do not leave a blank. You use a defined substitute.

Check first whether an organization is responsible. A page published by a health agency, a company or a university department has a group author, and that organization goes in the author position even if no person is named. Use the full name rather than an abbreviation, and the same name as the site name is not repeated, so when the author and the site are the same, you drop the site name from the reference.

If there is genuinely no author of any kind, move the title to the author position. The reference then begins with the italic title, followed by the date, then the site name and URL. In the text, cite the title in double quotation marks, shortened to the first few words if it is long, followed by the year.

Write n.d., which stands for no date, in the parentheses. Look carefully before you give up on a date, because many pages show a published or last updated date near the title, at the bottom, or in the page metadata. Use the date of publication or of the most recent update if that is what the page shows. If a page says Copyright 2024 at the bottom and nothing else, 2024 is acceptable, but it is a last resort.

In the text, an undated source is cited with the author or title and n.d., for example (World Health Organization, n.d.).

Describe the content in square brackets in the title position, and do not italicize it. For example, a page that only shows a chart might use [Chart of national unemployment rates]. Keep the description short and factual. This is also the approach for many images and social media posts that have no formal title.

APA 7 does not ask for a retrieval date for most pages. It asks for one when the content is designed to change over time and the page is not archived, such as a live dashboard, a profile page or a regularly updated statistics page. In that case add Retrieved Month Day, Year, from followed by the URL. If an archived copy exists, cite the archived version with its own date instead.

• ▸Using the website name as the author when a different organization or person is named on the page.
• ▸Writing the page title in title case. APA reference titles use sentence case, with the first word, the first word after a colon and proper nouns capitalized.
• ▸Italicizing the site name. The site name is plain text, and the page title is the italic part.
• ▸Forgetting the hanging indent. Every reference after the first line is indented by half an inch.
• ▸Listing more than 20 authors in full. For longer lists, give the first 19, an ellipsis and then the final author.
• ▸Adding a period after a URL. In APA 7 the URL ends the reference with no trailing period.

Build the entry once with the APA Citation Generator on this site, which handles initials, ampersands, n.d. and the title in the author position. Then check three things by hand: the capitalization of the title, whether the author and site name duplicate each other, and whether the page needs a retrieval date. Those are the details automated tools cannot judge from your input alone.