You may find that you need to cite text from an unpaginated ebook, or from an online source such as a journal or webpage. This post, by Faculty Librarian Dr Richard Pears, co-author of Cite Them Right, explains how.
Wherever possible, the Library purchases ebooks to ensure that all members of the University have access to the sources they need for learning and research. Some publishers provide ebooks that are paginated like printed books; other publishers have inhouse formats that present ebooks as continuous text without the page numbers seen in the printed book.
As a general principle, you should cite what you have seen. If you’ve used an ebook edition of a text you should follow the guidance for ebooks in the referencing style that you are using. Note that the guidance may vary between ebooks that replicate the pagination of the printed book, and other ebook formats that do not have pagination. The major referencing styles suggest the use of chapter/sections/paragraph numbers to cite from online sources (ebooks, articles, webpages, blogs, etc.). You can select the title of each style for more information:
American Psychological Association – to directly quote from written material that does not contain page numbers (e.g., webpages and websites, some ebooks), provide readers with another way of locating the quoted passage. Any of the following approaches is acceptable; use the approach that will best help readers find the quotation.
Chicago Manual of Style – to cite a book consulted online, include either a URL or the name of the database in the reference list entry. For downloadable ebook formats, name the format; if no fixed page numbers are available, cite a section title or a chapter or other number in the text (or simply omit).
Harvard via Cite Them Right (see p. 27) – when citing direct quotations from sources without pagination (ebooks, journal articles, media, web pages), use the information you have to help the reader locate the quotation. For example, you may use chapter/sections/paragraph numbers if provided, or you can count paragraphs from the beginning of the document or a section/chapter.
Modern Humanities Research Association (see p. 68) – referring to a position in an ebook can be difficult. Most academic ebooks are derived from an original publication which has been typeset in the traditional way, with an imprint page (giving information on the publisher and date of publication) and fixed pagination throughout. Cite as if you are citing a printed book, following the guidelines given above. There is no need to give the name of the ebook format or reader through which you accessed the work. Give page numbers or section details only if these are fixed and stable. Some ebook formats have no pagination and others give different pagination in different screen readers or formats (so that, for instance, the pagination might be different if the book is read on a phone versus on a tablet). If that is the case, do not give a page number. Instead, provide as much information as you can to enable your reader to locate the citation on any device. If you quote from the work, this should be sufficient to allow your reader to search for the location. If not quoting, consider including a chapter number or the text of a subheading.
Modern Languages Association – to cite a note in a work that does not have page numbers, indicate the chapter or other division where the note occurs.
OSCOLA – if the ebook provides the same page numbers as in the printed publication, cite the ebook as if it was the printed book. If the ebook has no page numbers, follow the normal book (or edited book) citation form, including the ebook type/edition before the publisher. For pinpoints where there are no page numbers, provide chapter or section number (or section name, if a number isn’t provided) and subsection or paragraph number if provided. For example:
Williams on Wills (9th edn, Lexis Library edn, Lexis Nexis 2007) vol 1, part F, para 23.1.
Vancouver via Citing Medicine (note that this has not been updated for many years, but has examples of books on websites – see B. Sample Citation and Introduction to Citing Parts of Web Sites) – when citing a part of a print book, the location (pagination) of the part is shown as the numbers of the pages on which the part resides, such as p. 34-6. When citing a part of a Web site, unless the part is in PDF (Portable Document Format), standard page numbers are not available. For non-PDF parts:
- Give location as the total extent of the part.
- Calculate extent by the best means possible, in terms of the number of print pages, screens, paragraphs, or bytes, and place the total in square brackets. Screen size, font used, and printers vary greatly, but the purpose is to give an indication of the length of the part.
- Use the word “about” before the length indicator when the number is calculated.
Citing from journal articles with no pagination
As more journal articles are published online some publishers are omitting page numbers because the articles are not sequentially paginated in a journal issue. Each article has an identifying number. As an example, see this article by Cheng (you will need to log in with your Durham username and password).
If you read this article as it is presented in a continuous stream of text, there are no page numbers. To cite from the paragraph beginning ‘Using AI generative technology to create a digital character as a replica of the deceased has recently become a trend and a business in China’, this is the third paragraph, so this could be cited with an in-text reference (Harvard style):
As noted by Cheng (2025, para 3) …
If you download the pdf, the page numbers relate only to the page of the pdf, not the place of the article in the journal issue. If possible, for an online article use the page numbers in the pdf. For example, in the Cheng article, to cite from the paragraph beginning ‘Using AI generative technology to create a digital character …’ this is on the second page of the pdf, so this would have an in-text citation:
As noted by Cheng (2025, p. 2 of pdf) …
The Reference list entry for both the paragraph number and pdf page number would be the same:
Cheng K. Y. (2025) ‘The law of digital afterlife: the Chinese experience of AI “resurrection” and “grief tech”’, International Journal of Law and Information Technology 33(1), article eaae029. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/ijlit/eaae029
Citing from a webpage
Use section headings and count paragraphs to give an accurate position of the cited text, for example:
In-text citation:
Bishop Van Mildert donated books to the Library (Durham University, 2025, para 2).
Reference list:
Durham University (2025) Archives and Special Collections. Available at: https://www.dur.ac.uk/departments/library/archives-and-special-collections/ (Accessed: 16 June 2025).
For more information and referencing examples, see Cite them right online or contact your Faculty Librarian.
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