Each entry is built from nine core elements:. Following this format, you can create a citation for any type of source—for example, a book , journal article , website , or movie. Using the interactive tool, you can see what an MLA citation looks like for different source types. Regardless of the source type, the most important elements of any MLA citation are the author , the source title , and the publication date. If any of these are missing from the source, the Works Cited entry will look slightly different.

MLA in-text citations are brief references that direct your reader to the full source entry. You include them every time you quote , block quote , paraphrase or summarize a source. It also includes a page number or range to help the reader locate the relevant passage. If you already named the author in your sentence, include only the page number in parentheses:. If the source has no page numbers, you either use an alternative locator, or leave the page number out of the citation:. Scribbr MLA Citation Generator Accurate MLA citations, verified by experts, trusted by millions.

Webpage Journal article Book Video Online news article. More types. Add webpage manually. Save hours of repetitive work. Rely on accurate citations, verified by experts. Enjoy a clean look for minimal distraction. Get started. Features you'll love Autocite Search for your source by title, URL, DOI, ISBN, and more to retrieve the relevant information automatically. Export to Bib La TeX Easily export in BibTeX format and continue working in your favorite LaTeX editor. Export to Word Reference list finished? Export to Word with perfect indentation and spacing set up for you.

Sorting, grouping, and filtering Organize the reference list the way you want: from A to Z, new to old, or grouped by source type. Save multiple lists Stay organized by creating a separate reference list for each of your assignments. Fonts Choose between Times New Roman, Arial, Calibri, and more options to match your style. Industry-standard technology Scribbr's citation generator is built using the same citation software CSL as Mendeley and Zotero, but with an added layer for improved accuracy. Annotations Create perfectly formatted MLA Style annotated bibliographies with just a few clicks. Quick tips Explanatory tips help you get the details right to ensure accurate citations. Citation guides Getting to grips with citation is simple with the help of our highly rated MLA citation guides and videos.

Secure backup Your work is saved automatically after every change and stored securely in your Scribbr account. Accessed 31 May English Department. Purdue U, 20 Apr. For an individual page on a Web site, list the author or alias if known, followed by an indication of the specific page or article being referenced. Usually, the title of the page or article appears in a header at the top of the page. Follow this with the information covered above for entire Web sites. If the publisher is the same as the website name, only list it once. Lundman, Susan. Accessed 6 July Citations for e-books closely resemble those for physical books. Simply indicate that the book in question is an e-book by putting the term "e-book" in the "version" slot of the MLA template i. Silva, Paul J. How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing.

E-book, American Psychological Association, If the e-book is formatted for a specific reader device or service, you can indicate this by treating this information the same way you would treat a physical book's edition number. Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince , translated by W. Marriott, Kindle ed. Note: The MLA considers the term "e-book" to refer to publications formatted specifically for reading with an e-book reader device e. These e-books will not have URLs or DOIs. If you are citing book content from an ordinary webpage with a URL, use the "A Page on a Web Site" format above.

Provide the artist's name, the work of art italicized, the date of creation, the institution and city where the work is housed. Follow this initial entry with the name of the Website in italics, and the date of access. Goya, Francisco. The Family of Charles IV. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Museo Nacional del Prado , www. Accessed 22 May Klee, Paul. Twittering Machine. Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Artchive , www. Accessed May If the work cited is available on the web only, then provide the name of the artist, the title of the work, and then follow the citation format for a website.

If the work is posted via a username, use that username for the author. Adams, Clifton R. Provide the author name, article name in quotation marks, title of the web magazine in italics, publisher name, publication date, URL, and the date of access. Bernstein, Mark. Accessed 4 May For all online scholarly journals, provide the author s name s , the name of the article in quotation marks, the title of the publication in italics, all volume and issue numbers, and the year of publication. Include a DOI if available, otherwise provide a URL or permalink to help readers locate the source. MLA requires a page range for articles that appear in Scholarly Journals. If the journal you are citing appears exclusively in an online format i. there is no corresponding print publication that does not make use of page numbers, indicate the URL or other location information.

Dolby, Nadine. Accessed 20 May Cite articles in online scholarly journals that also appear in print as you would a scholarly journal in print, including the page range of the article. Provide the URL and the date of access. Wheelis, Mark. Accessed 8 Feb. Cite online databases e. LexisNexis, ProQuest, JSTOR, ScienceDirect and other subscription services as containers. Thus, provide the title of the database italicized before the DOI or URL. If a DOI is not provided, use the URL instead. Provide the date of access if you wish. Alonso, Alvaro, and Julio A. Accessed 26 May Langhamer, Claire.

Accessed 27 May Give the author of the message, followed by the subject line in quotation marks. Include the date the message was sent. Use standard capitalization. Kunka, Andrew. Neyhart, David. Cite web postings as you would a standard web entry. Provide the author of the work, the title of the posting in quotation marks, the web site name in italics, the publisher, and the posting date. Follow with the date of access.

Note for Purdue Students: Schedule a consultation at the on-campus writing lab to get more in-depth writing help from one of our tutors. This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use. MLA Modern Language Association style is most commonly used to write papers and cite sources within the liberal arts and humanities. This resource, updated to reflect the MLA Handbook 9 th ed.

Guidelines for referring to the works of others in your text using MLA style are covered throughout the MLA Handbook and in chapter 7 of the MLA Style Manual. Both books provide extensive examples, so it's a good idea to consult them if you want to become even more familiar with MLA guidelines or if you have a particular reference question. In MLA Style, referring to the works of others in your text is done using parenthetical citations. This method involves providing relevant source information in parentheses whenever a sentence uses a quotation or paraphrase. Usually, the simplest way to do this is to put all of the source information in parentheses at the end of the sentence i.

However, as the examples below will illustrate, there are situations where it makes sense to put the parenthetical elsewhere in the sentence, or even to leave information out. MLA format follows the author-page method of in-text citation. This means that the author's last name and the page number s from which the quotation or paraphrase is taken must appear in the text, and a complete reference should appear on your Works Cited page. The author's name may appear either in the sentence itself or in parentheses following the quotation or paraphrase, but the page number s should always appear in the parentheses, not in the text of your sentence.

For example:. Both citations in the examples above, and Wordsworth , tell readers that the information in the sentence can be located on page of a work by an author named Wordsworth. If readers want more information about this source, they can turn to the Works Cited page, where, under the name of Wordsworth, they would find the following information:. These examples must correspond to an entry that begins with Burke, which will be the first thing that appears on the left-hand margin of an entry on the Works Cited page:. Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. University of California Press, When a source has a corporate author, it is acceptable to use the name of the corporation followed by the page number for the in-text citation.

You should also use abbreviations e. If a source uses a labeling or numbering system other than page numbers, such as a script or poetry, precede the citation with said label. The speaker makes an ardent call for the exploration of the connection between the violence of nature and the divinity of creation. When a source has no known author, use a shortened title of the work instead of an author name, following these guidelines. Place the title in quotation marks if it's a short work such as an article or italicize it if it's a longer work e. plays, books, television shows, entire Web sites and provide a page number if it is available.

Titles longer than a standard noun phrase should be shortened into a noun phrase by excluding articles. For example, To the Lighthouse would be shortened to Lighthouse. If the title cannot be easily shortened into a noun phrase, the title should be cut after the first clause, phrase, or punctuation:. In this example, since the reader does not know the author of the article, an abbreviated title appears in the parenthetical citation, and the full title of the article appears first at the left-hand margin of its respective entry on the Works Cited page. Thus, the writer includes the title in quotation marks as the signal phrase in the parenthetical citation in order to lead the reader directly to the source on the Works Cited page. The Works Cited entry appears as follows:.

Accessed 23 Mar. If the title of the work begins with a quotation mark, such as a title that refers to another work, that quote or quoted title can be used as the shortened title. The single quotation marks must be included in the parenthetical, rather than the double quotation. Parenthetical citations and Works Cited pages, used in conjunction, allow readers to know which sources you consulted in writing your essay, so that they can either verify your interpretation of the sources or use them in their own scholarly work. Page numbers are always required, but additional citation information can help literary scholars, who may have a different edition of a classic work, like Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto.

In such cases, give the page number of your edition making sure the edition is listed in your Works Cited page, of course followed by a semicolon, and then the appropriate abbreviations for volume vol. When you cite a work that appears inside a larger source for instance, an article in a periodical or an essay in a collection , cite the author of the internal source i. For example, to cite Albert Einstein's article "A Brief Outline of the Theory of Relativity," which was published in Nature in , you might write something like this:. See also our page on documenting periodicals in the Works Cited.

Sometimes more information is necessary to identify the source from which a quotation is taken. For instance, if two or more authors have the same last name, provide both authors' first initials or even the authors' full name if different authors share initials in your citation. Best, David, and Sharon Marcus. JSTOR, doi Franck, Caroline, et al. If you cite more than one work by an author, include a shortened title for the particular work from which you are quoting to distinguish it from the others. Put short titles of books in italics and short titles of articles in quotation marks. Additionally, if the author's name is not mentioned in the sentence, format your citation with the author's name followed by a comma, followed by a shortened title of the work, and, when appropriate, the page number s :.

If you cite from different volumes of a multivolume work, always include the volume number followed by a colon. Put a space after the colon, then provide the page number s. If you only cite from one volume, provide only the page number in parentheses. In your first parenthetical citation, you want to make clear which Bible you're using and underline or italicize the title , as each version varies in its translation, followed by book do not italicize or underline , chapter, and verse. Sometimes you may have to use an indirect source. An indirect source is a source cited within another source.

For such indirect quotations, use "qtd. in" to indicate the source you actually consulted. Note that, in most cases, a responsible researcher will attempt to find the original source, rather than citing an indirect source. Sources that take the form of a dialogue involving two or more participants have special guidelines for their quotation and citation. Each line of dialogue should begin with the speaker's name written in all capitals and indented half an inch. A period follows the name e. After the period, write the dialogue.

Each successive line after the first should receive an additional indentation. When another person begins speaking, start a new line with that person's name indented only half an inch. Repeat this pattern each time the speaker changes. You can include stage directions in the quote if they appear in the original source. Conclude with a parenthetical that explains where to find the excerpt in the source. Pleadingly Give me a drink, Rocky. Harry said it was all right. God, I need a drink. Avidly Thanks. He takes the bottle with both twitching hands and tilts it to his lips and gulps down the whiskey in big swallows. With more and more scholarly work published on the Internet, you may have to cite sources you found in digital environments. While many sources on the Internet should not be used for scholarly work reference the OWL's Evaluating Sources of Information resource , some Web sources are perfectly acceptable for research.

When creating in-text citations for electronic, film, or Internet sources, remember that your citation must reference the source on your Works Cited page. Sometimes writers are confused with how to craft parenthetical citations for electronic sources because of the absence of page numbers. However, these sorts of entries often do not require a page number in the parenthetical citation. For electronic and Internet sources, follow the following guidelines:. Herzog, Werner, dir. Klaus Kinski. Filmverlag der Autoren, Yates, Jane. In the first example an online magazine article , the writer has chosen not to include the author name in-text; however, two entries from the same author appear in the Works Cited. If the title of the article was not named in the sentence, an abbreviated version would appear in a parenthetical citation at the end of the sentence.

Both corresponding Works Cited entries are as follows:. Taylor, Rumsey. Accessed 29 Sep. Accessed 2 April To cite multiple sources in the same parenthetical reference, separate the citations by a semi-colon:. When creating in-text citations for media that has a runtime, such as a movie or podcast, include the range of hours, minutes and seconds you plan to reference. For example: Common sense and ethics should determine your need for documenting sources. You do not need to give sources for familiar proverbs, well-known quotations, or common knowledge For example, it is expected that U. citizens know that George Washington was the first President.

A complete guide to MLA in-text citations An MLA in-text citation provides the author's last name and a page number in parentheses. Purdue U, 28 Nov. Museo Nacional del Prado , www. or pars. Name of Site. Give appropriate department and school names as well, following the course title. While many sources on the Internet should not be used for scholarly work reference the OWL's Evaluating Sources of Information resource , some Web sources are perfectly acceptable for research.

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