Chicago Citation Guide (17th Edition): No Author, No Date etc.

• No Author

• No Date

• No Page Numbers

• No Place of Publication

• Can't Find the Database Name?

If there is no author given, your citation will start with the title of the work. You must put these citations in correct alphabetical order in your Bibliography.

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 .

For example, this is how the following titles would be alphabetized:

Anthropology in Action [A]
The Best of Canada [B... ignore "The"]
Easy Plant Care [E]
5 Ways to Succeed in Business [F... 5=Five]
A Special Kind of Madness [S... ignore "A"]

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

See box "How to Alphabetize Titles in Bibliography" on this page for more information.

 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 as YouTube.

Print Materials: if no publication date is provided, use the initials n.d. where you would normally put the date.

Online materials: if no copyright or modification date is provided, use the date that you accessed the material (e.g. accessed June 12, 2024).

Some sources, such as online materials, won't have page numbers provided. If this is the case, leave the page numbers out of the citation.

 If there are no page, chapter, paragraph, or section numbers in the original text, then don't include any. Never count pages or paragraphs yourself.

If there is no place of publication given, use the initials n.p. where you would normally put the place of publication.

If you find an article through the search bar on the main library page, you might be unsure which database the article is from, because this searches across many different databases.

You can find the name of the database a few ways:

Method 1. You can find the name of the database when you have done a search for the article, and are on the results list. Find the name of the article that you are looking for, and look just below the title. The database name will be next to the author's name and publication information.

Method 2. You can also find the name of the database when you are in the record for the article (a page with a description of the article, as well as other useful information). To get to the record from the results list, click on the title of the article. At the top of the page, just below the title, the database name will be listed.

In the examples above, the name of the database is Directory of Open Access Journals.