Website
The Modern Language Association of America (MLA ) citation style provides guidelines for citing sources in academic writing.
The MLA Style Center site includes examples and instructions on formatting both the Works Cited page and in-text citations.
The MLA citation style uses the author-page method of citation. This means that each source in your paper is cited so that readers will know the author of the source as well as the location of the information within the source. This is called an in-text citation.
In-Text Citation
In-Text citations should be placed with any reference to information from a different source in your paper. The author of the source can either by listed in text or in parenthesis directly following the information. The page number that the information can be found on in the source should always be in parenthesis directly following the reference. Examples are provided below.
In-Text Citation Examples
In-text citations that reference information proposed by Mark Twain on page 297 of a book published in 1877 could be formatting in the following ways:
Author Mark Twain proposed that everyone should travel up and down the Mississippi River by steamboat (297).
It was proposed that everyone should travel up and down the Mississippi River by steamboat (Twain 297).
Works Cited List Citation
In the MLA citation style, each citation in the Works Cited list should have 9 core elements, or facts, related to each work you cite in your paper. They should be listed in the following order followed by the punctuation mark listed:
Author. Title of source. Title of container (work that source is contained in such as a book), Other contributors, Version, Number, Publisher, Publication date, Location. Examples are included below.
Works Cited List Examples
As stated above, each entry in the Works Cited list at the end of your paper contains the following core elements in the order shown with the exact punctuation shown between them:
Author. Title of Source. Title of Container, Contributor, Version, Number, Publisher, Publication Date, Location.
Different sources of information may have citations that look slightly different depending on what information about the source is available. For example, a book without chapters would be cited without a Title of Source. A book with chapters would be cited with the title of the chapter the information was cited from as a Title of Source. If a source does not have an author or publication date listed, you may not want to use it in your paper. See below for common Works Cited entry examples.
Books
Author(s). Title of Book, Publisher, Year,
Twain, Mark. Travel the Mississippi River by Riverboat. Knopf, 1877.
Articles
Author(s). "Title of Article." Title of Journal, Volume, Issue, Year, pages.
Twain, Mark. "My Journey Down the Mississippi." Mississippi River Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 1, 1877, p. 297.
Websites
Editor, author, or compiler name (if available). Title of Site. Version number, Name of institution/organization affiliated with the site (sponsor or publisher), date of resource creation (if available), URL, DOI or permalink. Date of access (if applicable).
Twain, Mark. Stories of Mississippi. U of Mississippi P, 1992, www.uom.com/stories.
Printable Documents
MLA 9th Edition Tarrant County College Learning Commons
The following printable resources (Word and PDF) offer examples for the general format of MLA research papers, in-text citations, and the reference page.
Print Book
The MLA Handbook is the official style guide published by the Modern Language Association.
