MLA Citation Generator

Real Modern Language Association (MLA) 9th edition references, formatted the way literature and the humanities coursework expects them.

MLA uses an author-page system. The in-text citation carries the author surname and the page number with no comma and no abbreviation such as p. If the source has no page numbers, as with most web pages, give the author alone. The list at the end is titled Works Cited and is alphabetised by the first element of each entry.

Citing a website in MLA follows the same core elements. Give the author, the page title in quotation marks, the site name in italics as the container, the publication date, and the location as a URL. MLA 9 asks you to drop the http:// or https:// prefix from the URL, and an access date is optional but useful for pages without a date.

The pattern each source type follows, as a quick reference. Fields in the generator are filled from the database record, but these are what the finished entries should look like.

MLA is the style of the Modern Language Association and is standard across literature, languages, cultural studies, film studies and composition courses. In North American schools and universities it is often the first style students are taught, which is why it turns up in humanities coursework far beyond literature departments. The ninth edition, current since 2021, kept the nine core elements introduced in the eighth and added guidance on inclusive language and annotated bibliographies.

MLA calls the list Works Cited rather than References or Bibliography, and the distinction is meaningful: it contains only what you actually cited.

• The heading is Works Cited, centred, on a new page.
• Entries are alphabetised by the first element, usually the author's surname, or the title when there is no author.
• Every entry uses a hanging indent of half an inch.
• The list is double spaced throughout with no extra space between entries.
• Only the first author's name is inverted; a second author appears in normal order.

Both are humanities styles, and students often move between them when they take a literature module alongside a history one.

• Page ranges are abbreviated in MLA: pp. 118-34, not pp. 118-134.
• Drop the protocol from URLs. Write www.who.int/example, not https://www.who.int/example.
• Only the first author is inverted. A second author appears as Brian C. Jones, in normal order.
• Three or more authors use the first name followed by et al., unlike APA which lists up to 20.
• The list is titled Works Cited, not References or Bibliography.

The format changes with the kind of source. These walk through the cases students hit most.

• How to cite a website in MLA

• APA

  psychology, education and the social sciences

  (Smith & Jones, 2024, p. 42)

• Chicago

  history, art history and publishing

  1. Jane Smith, Rivers and Empire (Boston: Meridian, 2024), 42.

• AMA

  medicine

  Smith et al reported similar findings.¹

• IEEE

  electrical engineering and computer science

  as shown in [1], [3]–[5]

• ACS

  chemistry

  as previously reported¹

• Turabian

  undergraduate humanities writing

  1. Jane Smith, Rivers and Empire (Boston: Meridian, 2024), 42.

• Vancouver

  biomedicine

  previous studies (1,2) have shown

• Harvard

  UK and Australian universities

  (Smith and Jones, 2024, p. 42)

• CSE

  biology and the natural sciences

  recent work¹ confirms