MLA Style Guide
MLA - Modern Language Association
Arts & Humanities- MLA Style Guide from Long Island University
- MLA Writer's Handbook from University of Wisconsin-Madison
Citing References in Text
Sources are acknowledged by brief parenthetical citations containing the author's last name and page number of the source material. You may omit the author's name if it is used in the text:- Ancient writers attributed the invention of the monochord to Pythagoras, who lived in the sixth century BC (Marcuse 197).
- At the intersection of language and culture lies a concept that Michael Agar has called "languaculture" (60).
Works Cited Examples
Also called: Literature Cited, Bibliography
References should be collected in an alphabetical list at the end of the paper.
Double-space all entries and between entries.
PRINT SOURCES
Journal Article
For journals with continuous pagination, issue numbers are not necessary, but for journals with non-continuous pagination, the volume number is followed by a period and the issue number.
Omit initial articles (a, an, the) in journal titles.
Girardet, Edward. "Eyewitness Afghanistan." National Geographic 200.6 (2001): 130-137.
Magazine Article
Weintraub, Arlene, and Laura Cohen. "A Thousand-Year Plan
for Nuclear Waste." Business Week 6 May 2002: 94-96.
Newspaper Article
Hirsch, Marianne. "The Day Time Stopped." Chronicle of Higher Education 25 Jan. 2002: B11-14.
Book - Single author
Marcuse, Sibyl. A Survey of Musical Instruments.
New York: Harper, 1975.
Book - More than one author
For 3 or more authors, you can either list all authors in full, or the first author, et al.
Bolner, Myrtle S., and Gayle A. Poirer. The Research Process: Books and Beyond. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall Hunt, 2001.
Gilman, Sander, et al. Hysteria beyond Freud. Berkeley:
U of California P, 1993.
Article or Chapter in an Anthology
More, Hannah. "The Black Slave Trade: A Poem." British Women Poets of the Romantic Era. Ed. Paula R. Feldman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. 472-482.
Encyclopedia Article
"Mandarin." The Encyclopedia Americana. New York: Americana Corp., 1994 ed.
Government Publication
United States. Cong. Joint Committee on the Investigation
of the Pearl Harbor Attack. Hearings. 79th Cong.,
1st and 2nd sess. 32 vols. Washington: GPO, 1946.
ELECTRONIC OR INTERNET SOURCES
Online Article from a Scholarly Journal
After the date of publication, give the date of access and URL.
Fukui, Yoshio. "Real-Time High-Resolution Optical
Sectioning Suggests Biphasic Cytokinetic Mechanism
in Dictyostelium Discoideum." Microscopy Research
and Technique 49.2 (2000): 183-189. 20 June 2001
<http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/search>.
Article from an Online Service (Database)
After page numbers, give the database name, database provider, name and address of the library, date of access and URL
Ellis, Aime J. "Where is Bigger's Humanity? Black Male
Community in Richard Wright's Native Son." ANQ
Summer 2002: 23-30 Wilson Select. OCLC FirstSearch.
Albin O. Kuhn Library, Baltimore,MD. 23 December
2002 <http://newfirstsearch.oclc.org/>.
Professional or Personal Website
Web sites should include the title of the site, name of the editor (if given), electronic publication information (version #, date of electronic publication or latest update, name of sponsoring institution or organization), and date of access and URL.
Discovery Channel Homepage. 2002. Discover.Com.
14 November 2000 <http://dsc.discovery.com/>.
Examples taken / modified from:
Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003.
