MLA Citation Guide (MLA 8th Edition): When Information Is Missing

If no author or creator is provided, start the citation with the title/name of the item you are citing instead.

Note: an author/creator won't necessarily be a person's name. It may be an organization or corporation, for example Health Canada or a username on a site such a YouTube.

Anonymous

If and only if an item is signed as being created by Anonymous, use "Anonymous" where you'd normally put the author's name.

Alphabetical Order in References List

Where you'd normally put the author's last name, instead use the first one, two, or three words from the title. Don't count initial articles like "A", "An" or "The". You should provide enough words to make it clear which work you're referring to from your Works Cited list.

If the title in the Works Cited list is in italics, italicize the words from the title in the in-text citation.

If the title in the Works Cited list is in quotation marks, put quotation marks around the words from the title in the in-text citation.

Examples of In-Text Citation with No Author:

(Cell Biology 12)

("Nursing" 12)

If no date is provided, skip that information. It's recommended that you add the date you accessed the work at the end of the citation. Access date is given by putting the word "Accessed" followed by the Day Month (Shortened) Year the work was accessed/viewed. For example Accessed 20 Aug 2016.

Page numbers may not be provided for some items, such as online materials. If this is the case leave the page numbers out of the citation.

If you find an article using Library Search make sure to click through to read the full article. Once you are looking at the full article it usually says the database name at the top of the screen.

If it is ambiguous or says something like "searching 12 databases" and you can't tell which one database it is from, enter the name of the database provider (e.g. Proquest, EBSCO, etc.) as the database.