GUIDES · MLA STYLE
MLA Works Cited.
The Works Cited page lists every source you cite in an MLA paper. MLA 9th edition builds each entry from the same core elements in the same order, so once you know the pattern you can cite almost anything. Here is the pattern, how to lay out the page, and examples for the sources you will cite most.
The core elements
Every entry uses the MLA core elements, in this order, leaving out any that do not apply:
| Element | What goes there | Followed by |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Author | Surname, first name | Full stop |
| 2. Title of source | The article, chapter, page or book you cite | Full stop |
| 3. Title of container | What holds the source: a journal, a book of essays, a website | Comma |
| 4. Other contributors | Editors, translators: edited by …, translated by … | Comma |
| 5. Version | An edition, such as 2nd ed. | Comma |
| 6. Number | Volume and issue: vol. 521, no. 7553 | Comma |
| 7. Publisher | The company or organization that published it | Comma |
| 8. Publication date | As exact as the source gives: 2015, May 2015, 1 Apr. 2021 | Comma |
| 9. Location | Page range (pp. 436–44), DOI or URL | Full stop |
A container is the larger whole that holds your source, as a journal holds an article. A source can sit in a second container, such as a database, which gets its own title and location after the first. The title of a source that sits inside a container goes in quotation marks; containers and stand-alone works, such as books, are italic. Titles use title case.
Formatting the page
MLA’s guidance on formatting a paper sets out the Works Cited page:
- Start it on a new page at the end of the paper, with the same running head as the rest.
- Center the title, Works Cited, with no full stop after it. With a single entry, the title is Work Cited.
- Double-space the whole list, including between entries.
- Use a hanging indent: the first line of each entry is flush left and later lines are indented 0.5 in.
- Sort entries alphabetically by their first word, usually the first author’s surname, or the title when there is no author. When you sort by title, skip an initial A, An or The, or the same word in another language, but keep it in the entry: The Hunger Games is filed under H, and Les triplettes de Belleville under T.
- For several works by the same author, give the name in the first entry only and three hyphens in its place after that: ---.
Authors
- One author: surname, then first name. Kahneman, Daniel.
- Two authors: reverse only the first name, then “and” and the second in normal order. Hochreiter, Sepp, and Jürgen Schmidhuber.
- Three or more: the first author, then “et al.” LeCun, Yann, et al.
- An organization that is also the publisher: skip the author, start with the title, and name the organization as publisher.
Examples by source type
| Source | Works Cited entry |
|---|---|
| Chapter in an edited book | Bould, Mark. “Speculative Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Fiction, edited by Joshua Miller, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 63–78. |
| Journal article, two authors | Hochreiter, Sepp, and Jürgen Schmidhuber. “Long Short-Term Memory.” Neural Computation, vol. 9, no. 8, Nov. 1997, pp. 1735–80, https://doi.org/10.1162/neco.1997.9.8.1735. |
| Web page, organization as author | “In-Text Citations: An Overview.” The MLA Style Center, Modern Language Association of America, 1 Apr. 2021, style.mla.org/in-text-citations-overview/. |
| Book | Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. |
| Journal article, three or more authors | LeCun, Yann, et al. “Deep Learning.” Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, May 2015, pp. 436–44, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539. |
The rows are in Works Cited order, so they also show the alphabetical sort: the web page has no author and is filed under “In-Text”. A few things to notice:
- Journal articles leave out the Publisher element.
- In a page range above 99, MLA usually shortens the second number to its last two digits: pp. 436–44, pp. 1735–80.
- MLA abbreviates most month names, as in Nov. and Apr.; short ones such as May are written out.
- The chapter example is MLA’s own, from its advice on citing book chapters; a chapter read online can add a second container after it, such as Cambridge Core, with its DOI.
DOIs, URLs and access dates
For a work you read online, MLA prefers a DOI, then a permalink, then a URL, as the location. A paginated article can give its page range too, followed by a comma and the DOI.
- DOIs: MLA 9 writes every DOI as a link beginning
https://doi.org/, as in https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539. - URLs: you can usually leave out
http://orhttps://: style.mla.org/in-text-citations-overview/. - Access dates are optional. Add one at the end, after the location, when it helps, especially for a web page that shows no publication date or may change: … style.mla.org/in-text-citations-overview/. Accessed 14 Oct. 2026.
In-text citations
Each in-text citation starts with the first word of its Works Cited entry, usually the author’s surname, and adds the page when you quote or point to a passage. There is no comma and no “p.” between them:
- One author: (Kahneman 20)
- Two authors: (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber 1736)
- Three or more: (LeCun et al. 436)
- No author: a short form of the title, (“In-Text Citations”)
- Author named in your sentence: only the page goes in parentheses. LeCun and colleagues write that deep learning “allows computational models that are composed of multiple processing layers to learn representations of data with multiple levels of abstraction” (436).
MLA keeps “et al.” for parentheses and the Works Cited list; in your own sentence, write “and colleagues” or “and others”, or name everyone.
Checked October 2026 against the MLA Style Center pages linked above, which follow the MLA Handbook, 9th edition. If your instructor gives different instructions, follow theirs.
Get the entry from a DOI
Our free MLA citation generator takes a DOI and gives you the MLA 9 Works Cited entry and its in-text citation, ready to copy. It runs in your browser and needs no account. Add the page number to the in-text citation yourself.
If you are collecting many sources, Docr’d, which we make, is a research library that keeps your papers, notes and highlights together and copies citations in MLA 9, APA 7 and 12 more styles, or exports BibTeX and RIS. It is in early access.