Web pages are the sources students cite most and format worst. A web reference needs four things — author, title, date and address — and news sites, ministry portals and NGO pages are inconsistent about displaying the first three.
Paste the address and this tool captures the URL and suggests the site name, then asks you for the rest. It deliberately does not attempt to read the page: a browser cannot fetch another site's content, and inferring a title from the address would be a guess rather than a citation.
Author: the named writer where there is one, and the organisation where there is not. A page on the Nepal Rastra Bank site with no byline is authored by Nepal Rastra Bank — not by "Anon", and not by the webmaster.
Title: the heading at the top of the article, not the text in the browser tab, which usually has the site name appended. Date: the publication or last-updated date, generally near the byline or at the foot of the page. URL: the address of that specific page.
Browsers block one site from reading another site's content — the same-origin policy. Any tool that claims to pull a title and author from a pasted URL is either routing the request through its own server or guessing from the address.
The guessing is what causes harm. A slug like /2024/03/budget-speech-highlights may omit a subtitle, mangle punctuation or preserve a headline that was later changed. Deriving an author from a domain name is worse. Reading three fields off the page takes seconds and produces a reference that survives checking.
With no date, use n.d. — "no date". Do not put the date you read the page in the year position: that is the access date, a separate field. Undated pages are common on Nepali institutional sites, so this comes up often.
With no author, move the title into the author position and start the reference there. Where an organisation clearly stands behind the page — a ministry, a bank, a university, an NGO — that organisation is the author. Avoid "Anonymous" unless the page genuinely credits someone by that name.
MLA recommends an access date for every online source, and Harvard variants generally require one. APA asks for one only where content is expected to change, such as a live exchange-rate page or a running statistics dashboard. IEEE and Vancouver want one for online-only material.
The reason is that pages change and vanish, and government portals in particular reorganise without redirects. The access date records which version you read. For a page you expect to move, save a copy and note the archived link too.
A neatly formatted reference does not make a source appropriate. Ask who published the page, whether they have reason to be accurate, whether the claims are sourced, and whether the same figure appears in an official publication you could cite instead.
For Nepali data, prefer the primary source: the CBS volume rather than a news summary of it, the Nepal Rastra Bank bulletin rather than a blog quoting the number. Established newspapers, ministries, universities and international organisations are usually defensible; undated aggregator posts with no named publisher are not.
Browsers cannot read another website's content, so there is nothing to retrieve without a server. Guessing a title from the URL would mean fabricating part of your citation.
Treat the organisation as the author — Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, or Nepal Rastra Bank — and continue with the page title and date.
Use n.d. for "no date". Do not substitute the date you read the page; that belongs in the access-date field.
MLA recommends one for all online sources and Harvard variants usually require one. APA asks for one only where the page is likely to change.
Always the exact page. A homepage link does not let a reader find what you relied on, which defeats the purpose of referencing.