The 9th edition of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Style Guide provides guidelines for citing sources in the text of your paper as well as in the Works Cited.
In-text MLA citation is straightforward: in parentheses, give the author's last name, a space (with no comma), and the location where you found your information (if available). So:
(Smith 8).(Jones).
The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University is a widely-used and respected source for style formatting and writing guidance. Use the navigation on the left-hand side of the page to remain within MLA-related resources.
In MLA style, the Works Cited page at the end of your paper lists all of your references and where you can access them, which MLA refers to as their "container." So, what's included in a Works Cited entry will vary depending upon the work. Following are the major terms that the MLA uses to describe containers:
Single authors are listed as Lastname, Firstname. If they use a middle name or middle initial, add it after the first name:
Melville, Herman.
Wallace, David Foster.
Two Authors:
Strunk, William, and E.B. White.
Three or more authors use just the first author followed by the phrase "et al.":
Wysocki, Anne Frances, et al.
Then comes the title. The titles of stand-alone works like books are italicized:
Tokarczuk, Olga. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead...
... while the titles of articles or pieces included in a larger work should be surrounded by quotation marks:
Harvey, Karen. "The Manuscript History of 'Tristram Shandy.'"
As of the 8th edition, the MLA handbook definers "containers" as the larger wholes that hold the source. So, for example:
| Item | Container |
|---|---|
| Journal article | Journal |
| Essay in an anthology | Book |
| Podcast episode | Podcast |
| A blog post | Blog |
| Newspaper article | Newspaper |
This optional field is where you list contributors to a work who aren't the main author: editors, translators, directors, performers, etc.
For example, a specific translation:
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Emily Wilson, W.W. Norton & Company, 2023.
A specific edition:
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Edited by Thomas Keymer and James Kelly. Oxford UP, 2009.
If you're citing a work that has been released in more than one form, identify which one that you're using.
The most common example of this is in different editions of books:
The Bible. Authorized King James Version, Oxford UP, 1998.
If the source that you're documenting is part of a numbered series, include that information. That might include:
A journal with volume and/or issue numbers:
McGowan, Maggie. "'Going Surprising' with Aphra Behn." Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 36, no. 4, 2024, pp. 629-636.
An episode in a TV series:
"Pine Barrens." The Sopranos, created by David Chase, season 3, episode 11, HBO, 2001.
Who made the work available to the public? This is often a traditional publishing company or studio.
For example, most print books have a publisher:
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Edited by Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Norton Critical Edition, 2024.
Publisher can be excluded when it's not given or redundant.
Check the copyright page or the title page for the publication date of your work.
"Location" depends upon of the format of the work that you're citing.
| Format | Location |
|---|---|
| Section of a print book | Page range |
| Online work | DOI, permalink, or URL |
One of the most common citation questions we're asked is how to cite an article found in an online database. Databases are subscription collections of materials like journal articles and books; in MLA terms, you can think of them as the largest containers of all, and you can find yourself citing the journal that the article was published in and the database containing that journal. So, here's an example, using the terms in the box above:
Using the terms
You can click on the image below for a full-sized screenshot of the article page where this information was found. JSTOR, the name of the database, is prominent in the branding at the top of the page, and information about the containing journal can be found near the author and title info.
Check out the Purdue OWL for detailed examples of how to cite specific types of sources in your Works Cited:
MLA Handbook, 9th Ed.
by
Check out our MLA Style for Modern Languages guide for details on how to style Works Cited lists for Spanish- and French-language resources.
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