Q. How can you find an author of a website?

This varies a lot, since there's not one standard format or style guide for websites to ensure that you can find certain info in certain places. (And that's why academic writing follows MLA/APA/Chicago/etc...)

Ideally, an author will be clearly stated at the top of the page, probably under the article title. A name may sometimes be given at the end of the article instead.

Sometimes, an author isn't named at all, anywhere, or maybe the page just says "Editorial Staff" or some variation of that -- in which case, you just skip over the author in your citation.

But to do some due diligence...

Other Common Places to Look:

• Is there an About page or a Contact page that names a contributor? Only really helpful if there's only 1 author for everything, but this is sometimes the case.
• Navigate to the homepage for the site. Sometimes a specific page doesn't name an author because the creator didn't expect people to skip the homepage by coming in through search results.
  • Try clicking the site logo at the top of the page: these usually link back to the home.
  •  If there's no logo or other navigation options, examine the url -- try deleting the most specific parts at the end and get to the main domain. Understanding the structure of a link and significance of the pieces in it can be very helpful not just for citations but working around broken links.
    • For example, https://pages.uoregon.edu/jschombe/ast121/lectures/lec14.html - there's a likely name in there, but nothing is mentioned on the page itself.
      • Cut off the tail to try looking at https://pages.uoregon.edu/jschombe/... and ta-da! Our author is James Schombert.
    • This doesn't always quite work. Experiment with removing different amounts of the url to try finding something workable. If all else fails, we could go to just uoregon.edu and try searching for ast121, perhaps.

Again, there is a LOT of possible variability. You're always welcome to contact the librarians to ask us if we can identify an author for your citation.