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Citation Guide: When Information is Missing

Formatting

Note: For your Works Cited list, all citations should be double spaced and have a hanging indent.

A "hanging indent" means that each subsequent line after the first line of your citation should be indented by 0.5 inches.

No Author

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. Also, it is possible for the author's name to be written as only initials. If the author is known only by initials, treat the initials as one unit - use the initials in your in-text citation and list the entry under the first initial in your Works Cited page. 

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

When putting works in alphabetical order, ignore initial articles such as "the", "a", or "an". For example the title The Best of Canada would be alphabetized as if it started with the word Best instead of the word The.

If the title begins with a number, alphabetize it as if the number was spelled out. For example the title 5 Ways to Succeed in Business would be alphabetized under F as if it had started with the word Five .

Examples:

For more information on how to cite an author's name known only by initials, check out the MLA blog page

No Date

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 2019.

No Page Numbers

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.

No Database Name

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.

United Nations International School, Hanoi
https://libguides.unishanoi.org/c.php?g=920428&p=6639067
libguides.unishanoi.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-51
40074
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:BXILQWARTFGPXPXNBWIJ4BWIGYB5KDFC
<urn:uuid:4bcfe514-366f-4251-9e3b-879a901aae21>
2019-12-10T01:51:11Z
13.54.130.134
text/html
sha1:RMHYSZY6WMTLDSPZFBBYSZCWJGYLT5G3
<urn:uuid:805afe0c-c73d-4bea-b88f-c2cb9ced5034>
https://libguides.unishanoi.org/c.php?g=920428&p=6639067
response
<urn:uuid:f6d4ab22-73ba-491a-a04c-4dbcbc81f47b>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-51
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for December 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-159.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/