MLA 9th Edition Works Cited and Citation Guide

MLA style is set out in the MLA Handbook from the Modern Language Association. The current edition is the 9th (2021). It is the standard style in literature, comparative literature, language teaching and cultural studies, and in most first-year writing courses in North America.

MLA is an author–page system. The in-text citation gives only (Author page); the date appears only in the Works Cited list. In fields that quote passages closely, where in a text an idea appears matters more than when it was published. To build an entry, choose MLA in the reference generator.

1. The core elements and containers

Instead of a separate formula for every source type, MLA 9 uses one template of nine core elements. You fill in the ones that apply, in order, and skip the rest.

A container is the larger whole that holds the source: a journal holds an article, a book holds a chapter, a website holds a page. There can be two. An article from The Georgia Review read on JSTOR has the journal as its first container and the database as its second, so elements 3–9 repeat for JSTOR and its URL. Because the logic is the same for everything, new kinds of sources fit without new rules.

2. Authors

• One author: Surname, full given name (Mantel, Hilary.). No initials unless the source uses them.
• Two: invert only the first name; join with and (Dorris, Michael, and Louise Erdrich.).
• Three or more: first author plus et al. (Adams, Peter, et al.).
• Organizations: give the organization as author, except when it is both author and publisher. Then skip the author and start with the title; the organization appears only as publisher (MLA 9, 5.19).
• No author: start with the title. Do not write "Anonymous."
• Editors and translators: if the editor is the focus, put them in the author slot with a lowercase role ("Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M., editor."). Otherwise use the Contributor slot: "edited by," "translated by."
• Several works by one author: after the first entry, replace the name with three em dashes (or three hyphens).

3. Dates and month abbreviations

• Dates run day month year: 28 Dec. 2014.
• In Works Cited, abbreviate months longer than four letters: Jan., Feb., Mar., Apr., Aug., Sept., Oct., Nov., Dec. May, June and July stay whole. September is Sept., not Sep.
• Seasons are lowercase: spring 2010.
• An access date ("Accessed 3 Mar. 2024.") is optional, and most useful when an online source has no date.
• MLA does not use n.d.; a missing date is simply omitted.

4. Titles

• All titles are in title case, including article titles (the opposite of APA).
• Self-contained wholes — books, periodicals, websites, films, dissertations — are italicized.
• Parts of a larger whole — articles, chapters, web pages, papers — go in "quotation marks."
• A period at the end of a quoted title goes inside the quotation marks; if the title ends in a question mark, add nothing.

5. Publishers, pages, DOIs and URLs

• For academic presses, University becomes U and Press becomes P: Princeton UP, U of Chicago P.
• Drop business words (Inc., Co.) and an initial The; change & to and (Harper and Row).
• Omit the publisher for periodicals and for websites whose name matches the publisher.
• Page ranges take p. or pp. For numbers above 99, give only the last two digits of the second number unless more are needed: pp. 348-58, pp. 103-04, pp. 395-401. Below 100, give both in full: pp. 69-88.
• The MLA's own publications use an en dash in ranges; its student examples use a hyphen. Either is fine if consistent.
• A newspaper article on nonconsecutive pages takes the first page plus a plus sign: pp. 12+.
• For location, prefer DOI → permalink → URL. Precede DOIs with https://doi.org/.
• For ordinary URLs, the MLA recommends dropping http:// and https:// in print (www.jstor.org/stable/41403188); keep the protocol if your document will display live hyperlinks.

See the DOI and URL guide.

6. In-text citations

• Basic form: (Author page), with no comma and no p.: (Mantel 45).
• Two authors: (Dorris and Erdrich 12). Three or more: (Adams et al. 55).
• If you name the author in your sentence, give only the page: Mantel describes … (45).
• For two works by the same author, add a short title: (Lee, Americas 34). Since MLA shows no year, there are no 2020a/2020b labels.
• With no author, use a shortened title. With no pages, omit the location or use a paragraph, chapter or section number (par. 4).
• Several sources: (Samuelson 43, 54; Miller 298).

The in-text citation generator shows the MLA form alongside other styles.

7. Formatting Works Cited

• Title the list Works Cited, centered, without bold or italics.
• Double-space throughout and use a 0.5-inch hanging indent.
• Alphabetize by surname; with no author, by the first main word of the title (ignore A, An, The).
• List only what you cite.

8. Examples by source type

These entries are reproduced from the MLA Style Center (style.mla.org).

Book

Mantel, Hilary. Wolf Hall. Picador, 2010.

Journal article

Berman, Russell A. “The Necessity of Second-Language Learning.” ADFL Bulletin, vol. 43, no. 2, 2015, pp. 11–14, https://doi.org/10.1632/adfl.43.2.11.

Goldman, Anne. “Questions of Transport: Reading Primo Levi Reading Dante.” The Georgia Review, vol. 64, no. 1, spring 2010, pp. 69-88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41403188.

Hallamore, G. Joyce. “The Symbolism of the Marble Muse in Stifter’s Nachsommer.” PMLA, vol. 74, no. 4, Sept. 1959, pp. 398–405.

Chapter or paper in a collection

Hualde, José Ignacio. “Patterns of Correspondence in the Adaptation of Spanish Borrowings in Basque.” Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 12-15, 1999: General Session and Parasession on Loan Word Phenomena, edited by Steven S. Chang et al., Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2000, pp. 348-58.

Dissertation

MLA 9 does not distinguish published from unpublished dissertations.

Njus, Jesse. Performing the Passion: A Study on the Nature of Medieval Acting. 2010. Northwestern U, PhD dissertation.

Web article

Deresiewicz, William. “The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur.” The Atlantic, 28 Dec. 2014, theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-death-of-the-artist-and-the-birth-of-the-creative-entrepreneur/383497/.

Newspaper (print, nonconsecutive pages)

Yamashita, Karen Tei. “The Orange.” Edited by Linda Mathews, Los Angeles Times Magazine, 30 June 1991, pp. 12+.

Report by an organization that is also the publisher

Academic Freedom and Tenure: University System of Georgia. American Association of University Professors, 2021.

Conference paper

Curnutt, Kirk. “A Meme-able Feast: Teaching Modernist Citationality and Hemingway Iconography.” MLA Annual Convention, 7 Jan. 2021, online.

Two works by one author

Lee, Rachel C. The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation. Princeton UP, 1999.

———. The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies. New York UP, 2014.

9. Mixing Korean and English sources

Korean journals in English and literary studies usually start from MLA, but the journal's own guidelines take priority. Common local conventions: full Korean author names; 『』 for Korean book titles and 「」 for article titles instead of italics and quotation marks; Korean sources listed first in 가나다 order; and publisher names written in full, without UP abbreviations. Some journals also add a year to in-text citations. See the Korean journal guide.

10. Common mistakes

• A comma or "p." in the in-text citation — write (Mantel 45).
• Initials instead of full names in Works Cited.
• Listing all of three or more authors — use et al.
• "Sep." — MLA uses Sept.
• Month-day-year order — MLA uses 7 Jan. 2021.
• Leaving https:// on URLs in a printed paper — drop it, except in DOIs.
• "University of Chicago Press" — write U of Chicago P.
• Italicizing an article title — parts take quotation marks.
• "pp. 348-358" — shorten to pp. 348-58.
• Repeating an author's name in consecutive entries — use three em dashes.

Check English title capitalization with the title case tool and overall layout with the thesis checklist.

Examples by source type — MLA 9th

These examples are generated by this site's formatting engine from fictional sample data (not real publications).

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