diff --git a/DESCRIPTION b/DESCRIPTION
index 22cc1ba25f..a33d1f1745 100644
--- a/DESCRIPTION
+++ b/DESCRIPTION
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 Package: knitr
 Type: Package
 Title: A General-Purpose Package for Dynamic Report Generation in R
-Version: 1.45.1
+Version: 1.45.2
 Authors@R: c(
     person("Yihui", "Xie", role = c("aut", "cre"), email = "xie@yihui.name", comment = c(ORCID = "0000-0003-0645-5666")),
     person("Abhraneel", "Sarma", role = "ctb"),
diff --git a/NEWS.md b/NEWS.md
index e7b9dddb11..73eb323113 100644
--- a/NEWS.md
+++ b/NEWS.md
@@ -1,5 +1,8 @@
 # CHANGES IN knitr VERSION 1.46
 
+## BUG FIXES
+
+- `write_bib()` generated empty entries for packages without URLs (thanks, @bastistician, #2304).
 
 # CHANGES IN knitr VERSION 1.45
 
diff --git a/R/citation.R b/R/citation.R
index d7588304bf..470149e5a3 100644
--- a/R/citation.R
+++ b/R/citation.R
@@ -86,10 +86,9 @@ write_bib = function(
   x = setdiff(x, setdiff(xfun::base_pkgs(), 'base'))
   x = sort(x)
   bib = sapply(x, function(pkg) {
-    cite = citation(pkg, auto = if (pkg != 'base') {
-      meta = packageDescription(pkg, lib.loc = lib.loc)
-      # don't use the citation() URL if the package has provided its own URL
-      if (is.null(meta$URL)) return(meta)
+    meta = packageDescription(pkg, lib.loc = lib.loc)
+    # don't use the citation() URL if the package has provided its own URL
+    cite = citation(pkg, auto = if (is.null(meta$URL)) meta else {
       if (packageURL) meta$Repository = meta$RemoteType = NULL
       # the package may have provided multiple URLs, in which case we use the
       # first. We also work around a bug in citation() up to R 4.3.1. The grep