The No-Author Citation Challenge for Reference Works
Dictionaries and encyclopaedias frequently present entries without named individual authors — the content is produced by the editorial team or by unnamed experts engaged by the publisher. This is particularly common in widely used reference works like Merriam-Webster, the Oxford English Dictionary, and encyclopaedic databases like Britannica. Malaysian postgraduate researchers who cite these sources for conceptual definitions need to know how APA 7th handles the no-author situation for reference works, since the standard author-date citation format does not apply in the usual way.
Moving the Entry Title to the Author Position
When a dictionary or encyclopaedia entry has no named author, APA 7th instructs you to move the title of the entry to the author position in the reference list. The entry is then alphabetised by the first significant word of the entry title. The format is: Entry title. (Year). In Name of Dictionary or Encyclopaedia. Publisher. URL.
Example: Motivation. (2024). In Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/motivation
In-text citations for no-author entries use the entry title in quotation marks for article-length entries, or in italics for longer works — and the year: (“Motivation,” 2024). If the entry title is long, abbreviate it to the first few significant words in the in-text citation while keeping the full title in the reference list.
Why Academic Dictionaries Are Preferable to General Ones
When your thesis requires a formal definition of a disciplinary concept, academic and professional dictionaries carry more scholarly authority than general-purpose dictionaries. The APA Dictionary of Psychology, the Encyclopaedia of Education, or discipline-specific terminology references provide definitions developed within the scholarly community that uses these terms technically. General dictionaries like Merriam-Webster are appropriate for defining everyday words used in a specialised sense in your thesis, but they should not be the primary source for definitions of technical disciplinary constructs — those definitions should come from the theoretical literature, with general dictionaries serving at most as a starting point.
In practice, many examiners will question why a postgraduate thesis cites a dictionary for a construct definition when the theoretical literature would provide a more precise and more scholarly grounded definition. Reserve dictionary citations for cases where you genuinely need to define a non-technical word precisely — where the dictionary definition itself is what matters — rather than using dictionaries as shortcuts for defining technical concepts you should be defining from the literature. Knowing how to cite dictionaries and encyclopaedia entries without named authors in APA correctly ensures that when these sources are appropriate, they are attributed with full scholarly accuracy.
