CITATION GENERATOR · MLA

MLA citation generator.

Paste a DOI to get an MLA 9th edition Works Cited entry and in-text citation, ready to copy. Free, no account, and it runs in your browser.

The MLA 9 Works Cited format

MLA builds every entry from the same core elements in a fixed order: author, title of the source, title of the container, other contributors, version, number, publisher, publication date and location. A journal article looks like this:

LeCun, Yann, et al. “Deep Learning.” Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, May 2015, pp. 436–44, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.

• Authors. One author is Surname, First name. Two are joined with “and”, the second in normal order. Three or more are the first author followed by “et al.”
• Titles are in title case. An article’s title is in quotation marks; the journal, the container that holds it, is italic.
• Location. For an article with a DOI, MLA 9 prefers the DOI, written as a https://doi.org/ link.
• Works Cited is alphabetical by the first word of each entry, skipping an initial A, An or The, with a hanging indent. See the MLA Works Cited guide.

MLA in-text citations

MLA cites by author and page, with no comma between them: (LeCun et al. 437). The tool gives the author part, (LeCun et al.), because a DOI record cannot know which page you are citing; add the page number yourself. If you name the authors in your sentence, the parentheses hold only the page.

What to check

The entry is built from what the publisher registered for the DOI. MLA’s title case is applied automatically, which can misjudge names, acronyms and chemical formulas, so read the title once. Add a missing issue or page range from the article itself, and remove a publisher’s name if your instructor asks you to leave it out for journals.

Need another style? The same tool does APA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver and more, and BibTeX for LaTeX.

Keep your references in a library

Docr’d is a research library for papers, books and standards. It keeps your PDFs, notes and highlights together, and copies citations in MLA and thirteen other styles, or as BibTeX and RIS. The desktop apps for macOS, Windows and Linux are free to use without an account. Docr’d is in early access, so you may run into rough edges.

Credits

Citations are formatted in your browser by citeproc-js, (c) Frank Bennett — citeproc-js implements the Citation Style Language, used under the Common Public Attribution License 1.0 (see our modification notice), with styles from the CSL project under CC BY-SA 3.0. Records come from Crossref and DataCite. More on how it works on the citation generator page.