In this day and age of dubious online content, it’s critical to double-check the sources you’re reading. Many websites, whether by accident or design, may obscure the author’s name. You can learn more about the author by emailing the site’s owner, conducting a special search, or even searching for that text elsewhere.
In this article, I will go over various methods for locating the author of a website as well as why it is important to locate the author for academic purposes.
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Best Ways To Find Author of Website
Here are some of the best ways to find the author of a website:
WHOIS That Author
The WHOIS information maintained by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is another resource for locating the author. Every time a domain name is bought from a domain registrar, WHOIS information is necessary.
In the case of websites run by a single author, this can not just provide a name but also useful contact details. This isn’t necessarily true, thus extra research will probably be needed to identify the author’s identity. The domain owner may not always be the creator of the content.
Additionally, website owners have the option of using a proxy service, which conceals their identity to everyone but law authorities.
Examine the About and Contact pages on the website’s main page.
Checking the website’s primary pages, such as the “About Us,” “Contact Us,” and “Our Story” pages, is one quick way to identify a website’s author.
There are typically “about us” or “our story” pages on websites. This is typically a page on a website that contains details about the writer or the company that created and maintains the website. On these pages, the author’s name or a list of the authors who contribute to the website may occasionally be listed.
On their “contact us” pages, websites could also list the names of the authors or the person to contact, which can be helpful in determining who wrote the content.
However, some websites may not have links to these pages available on every page, and these pages may not always include the most recent information.
Checking the website’s footer for the author and publisher’s information is another, and probably the easiest, way to identify a website’s author.
If you are unable to identify the author of the article or page, it may be helpful to merely reference the publisher.
Using a website’s footer to identify the author
The About page, which could include details about the author like their name and contact information, is one of the important pages of the website that is shown in the footer.
The author’s name can also be found on an author profile page. This page offers details on the author, including a biography, a picture, and their contact information. To get directly to the author page, there are standard permalink formats depending on the CMS that the websites use.
Example.com/author is the structure of a WordPress-powered website, and looking for these pages may be helpful.
Check the website’s article sources.
You can browse through the sources of an academic article to find the author. The author of the website drew inspiration from these websites, books, and articles when creating it.
Look for a “References” or “Bibliography” section at the conclusion of the article to identify the sources. Try searching Google for “[article name] + bibliography” if you can’t find one or believe the website hosting the piece isn’t legitimate. This will display the articles from reliable websites that list the author’s sources.
Conclusion
To summarise, there are several methods for locating the author of a website, and the best method depends on the website you are attempting to cite. To increase your chances of finding the author’s name, try the methods discussed above.
