Can I correctly cite a source with no author in MLA?
I have a psychology paper due in two days and I’m nervous because I can’t see the author’s name on the article I need to reference. My professor insists on perfect MLA formatting, but I have dyslexia and struggle with the citation rules. I tried using an online generator, but it kept inserting a placeholder author and my instructor marked it wrong. How should I format the citation to meet the requirements?
1 Answer
Yes, you can absolutely cite a source with no author in MLA style, and it is actually a very common scenario that your professor will expect you to handle correctly. When an organization or an individual author is not named, MLA rules dictate that you simply skip the author element and start your citation with the title of the source instead. For your works cited page, this means the title of the article will move to the very beginning of the entry, and for your in-text citations, you will use a shortened version of that title in parentheses. Online citation generators often struggle with this and default to inserting placeholders like Anonymous or Unknown, which is exactly why your instructor flagged it; MLA explicitly discourages using those placeholders unless the source itself is specifically credited to Anonymous. To make this work in your psychology paper, you need to pay close attention to how you format that title depending on where it appears. In your works cited list at the end of your paper, start with the article title in quotation marks, followed by a period inside the closing quotation mark, and then proceed with the rest of the container details like the website name in italics, the publisher, and the URL. For your in-text citation, instead of writing an author's last name, you will put the first few words of the article title in quotation marks inside the parentheses. For example, if you are referencing an unsigned article titled "The Neurological Impact of Sleep Deprivation on Adolescents," your in-text citation would look like "Sleep Deprivation" in quotation marks, followed by the page number if there is one. This keeps your writing flowing naturally while still pointing your reader directly to the correct alphabetical entry on your bibliography page. The main trap to avoid here is confusing a missing individual author with a corporate author. In psychology and other sciences, many articles without a single person's name listed are actually published by government agencies, professional associations, or research institutions. If an organization is clearly responsible for the content, MLA allows you to list that organization as the author. However, if the organization is also the publisher of the website, you should still start the citation with the title to avoid redundancy, listing the organization only as the publisher later in the entry. Since you mentioned struggling with dyslexia, trying to memorize all these shifting variables can feel incredibly overwhelming, especially with a tight deadline. My best advice is to focus on the visual pattern of starting with quotation marks for the title rather than trying to force an author's name where one does not exist, as this simple shift will instantly make your citations look polished and professional.
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