MLA Citation Generator

Enter your source details and get a correctly formatted MLA 9th-edition Works Cited entry, plus the matching in-text citation, in seconds. Built on the MLA core-elements template that underpins the essays, close readings, research papers and dissertations you write in English, literature and the humanities — with a live preview you can copy straight into your Works Cited page.

Used in: English, literature, modern languages, philosophy, cultural studies and the arts and humanities more broadly — MLA is the standard style for writing about texts, films and other works.

MLA · 9th editionAuthor–page

Enter your source

Auto-cite from a DOI, ISBN or PubMed ID

Or fill the form yourself below. A bare web address can’t be looked up in the browser — paste its DOI instead.

Source type

A peer-reviewed article in an academic journal.

Author

Digital Object Identifier, if the source has one.

Year published

Add an author or a title and your formatted MLA citation appears here instantly.

In your text

Author and page number in round brackets, with no comma between them: (Tulving and Thomson 352). Use only the surname; for three or more authors give the first surname plus “et al.”

In your reference list

A list titled “Works Cited”, alphabetical by the first author’s surname with a hanging indent. The first author is inverted with full given names, the rest stay in natural order. Source titles go in double quotation marks; the container (journal, website, anthology) is italicised.

MLA tips
  • Title the page “Works Cited” and order entries alphabetically by surname.
  • Invert only the first author (“Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson”); list every later author first name first.
  • Three or more authors → first author followed by “et al.” in both the entry and the in-text citation.
  • Quote the title of an article, chapter or web page; italicise the container that holds it.
  • In text, write the page number with no comma and no “p.”: (Kuhn 23).

Your works cited is empty. Build a citation above and choose “Add to list” to collect your sources here, correctly ordered and ready to copy or export.

The MLA 9 core elements

One template builds every source: the nine-element container system

MLA 9 replaces a separate recipe per source type with a single ordered sequence. You ask the same nine questions of a book, a journal article or a TikTok video and assemble whatever answers exist, each with its own fixed punctuation. Skip an element if it does not apply — the order never changes.

  1. 1
    Author.ends with a full stop

    Surname, full given name — invert the first author only.

  2. 2
    “Title of Source.”in double quotation marks

    The specific thing you read: an article, chapter or web page.

  3. 3
    Title of Container,italicised, ends with a comma

    The larger work that holds the source: a journal, anthology or website.

  4. 4
    Other contributors,comma

    Editors, translators, directors — “edited by …”, “translated by …”.

  5. 5
    Version,comma

    An edition or release: “3rd ed.”, “expanded version”.

  6. 6
    Number,comma

    Volume and issue for a journal: “vol. 80, no. 5”.

  7. 7
    Publisher,comma

    The organisation that produced the work.

  8. 8
    Publication date,comma

    Day-month-year with an abbreviated month, or the year alone for a journal.

  9. 9
    Location.ends with a full stop

    Page range, DOI or URL — where the source sits.

Containers nest

An article inside a journal inside a database

When a source sits inside more than one container — an article in a journal you reached through a database — you list the elements once for the inner container, then repeat the relevant ones for the outer container.

Container 2 · the databaseJSTOR
Container 1 · the journalPsychological Review
The source
Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson. “Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory.”
Psychological Review, vol. 80, no. 5, 1973, pp. 352-73,
JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0020071.
Read it as a sentence
The full entry runs together as one flowing reference — inner container first, outer container second, each ending where the next begins.
Source-type cheat sheet

The nine elements, filled in for the sources you cite most

Every template below is the same core-elements sequence with the parts that do not apply left out. Find your source type, follow the pattern and confirm the worked example against the live preview at the top of the page.

Journal article

template
Author. “Title of Article.” Journal Name, vol. X, no. Y, Year, pp. xx-xx, DOI/URL.
Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson. “Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory.” Psychological Review, vol. 80, no. 5, 1973, pp. 352-73, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0020071.

Book

template
Author. Title of Book. Edition, Publisher, Year.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed., University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Book chapter

template
Author. “Title of Chapter.” Title of Book, edited by Editor, Publisher, Year, pp. xx-xx.
McGann, Jerome J. “The Rationale of Hypertext.” Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory, edited by David C. Greetham, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 19-46.

Website

template
Author. “Title of Page.” Website Name, Day Mon. Year, URL. Accessed Day Mon. Year.
Cherry, Kendra. “How Human Memory Works.” Verywell Mind, 10 June 2022, https://www.verywellmind.com/how-memory-works-2795000. Accessed 15 Jan. 2024.

Newspaper article

template
Author. “Title of Article.” Newspaper Name, Day Mon. Year, URL.
Carrington, Damian. “World Leaders Strike Landmark Climate Deal at COP26.” The Guardian, 13 Nov. 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/13/cop26-climate-deal.

Online video

template
Uploader. “Title of Video.” Platform, Day Mon. Year, URL.
Veritasium. “The Science of Thermodynamics.” YouTube, 2 Apr. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb-zVtJf9Hk.

Conference paper

template
Author. “Title of Paper.” Proceedings Title, Publisher, Year, pp. xx-xx.
Vaswani, Ashish, and Noam Shazeer. “Attention Is All You Need.” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Curran Associates, 2017, pp. 5998-6008.

Thesis / dissertation

template
Author. Title of Thesis. Year, Institution, Description, URL.
Doe, Jane A. Essays on Monetary Policy and Inflation Expectations. 2019, University of Oxford, Doctoral dissertation, https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:example.

Report

template
Author/Organisation. Title of Report. Publisher, Year, URL.
World Health Organization. World Health Statistics 2023: Monitoring Health for the SDGs. World Health Organization, 2023, https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240074323.
Anatomy of an entry

Inside a Works Cited entry, part by part

A journal article reference, broken into the elements that build it. Each row shows the exact text MLA produces and the rule that governs it — notice how quotation marks mark the source and italics mark the container.

The finished reference
Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson. “Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory.” Psychological Review, vol. 80, no. 5, 1973, pp. 352-73, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0020071.
1Author(s)
Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson.

Invert only the first author (surname, then full given name); list every later author first name first. End the element with a full stop.

2Title of source
“Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory.”

The article title goes in double quotation marks, in title case, with the closing full stop inside the quotes.

3Title of container
Psychological Review,

The journal is the container that holds the article — italicised, in title case.

4Number
vol. 80, no. 5,

Volume and issue carry the labels “vol.” and “no.”, separated by a comma.

5Publication date
1973,

For a journal article with only a year, give the year alone; fuller dates read “10 June 2022”.

6Location
pp. 352-73,

Page range with “pp.”, a hyphen, and a condensed second number (352-73, not 352-373).

7Location (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1037/h0020071.

A DOI is the preferred location element, given as a full https://doi.org/ link, and the entry ends in a full stop.

In-text citations

Author and page, no comma, no “p.”

MLA points the reader to the right Works Cited entry with the author’s surname and the page you drew on — placed in round brackets, with nothing between them. Name the author in your sentence and you give the page alone.

The shape of a citation
(Kuhnsurname
,no comma
23)page

A single space separates the surname and the page — never a comma, and never the abbreviation “p.”

Two authors

Join both surnames with “and”.

(Tulving and Thomson 352)

Three or more authors

Give the first surname, then “et al.”

(Vaswani et al. 5998)

No page numbers

A web page has no pages — give the author alone, with nothing else.

(Cherry)

Author named in the sentence

Kuhn already appears in your prose, so only the page goes in brackets.

…as Kuhn argues (23).
No author at all?
Use a shortened form of the title in the author position — in quotation marks for an article or web page, italicised for a book or film — and place the closing bracket after it.
Get it right

The MLA slips that cost easy marks

These are the differences a marker notices first — initials versus full names, sentence case versus title case, a stray comma in the in-text citation. Each pair shows the common error beside the correct form.

Avoid
Tulving, E., and D. M. Thomson.
Correct
Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson.

Why: MLA uses full given names, not initials — so long as the source gives them.

Avoid
Thomson, Donald M., and Endel Tulving.
Correct
Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson.

Why: Invert only the first author and list later authors in natural (first-name-first) order; the order follows the source, not the alphabet.

Avoid
Tulving, Endel. “Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory.”
Correct
Tulving, Endel. “Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory.”

Why: MLA uses title case, not sentence case — capitalise all principal words in titles.

Avoid
Kuhn, Thomas S. “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”
Correct
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Why: A whole book is its own source: italicise the title, never put it in quotation marks (quotation marks are for parts of a larger container, like an article or chapter).

Avoid
pp. 352–373.
Correct
pp. 352-73,

Why: MLA uses a hyphen and a condensed second number (352-73), and the page element is followed by a comma when a location element such as a DOI follows it.

Avoid
(Tulving and Thomson, 352)
Correct
(Tulving and Thomson 352)

Why: The in-text citation is author–page with no comma and no “p.” between the surname and the page number.

Works Cited

A sample MLA reference list

Your references gather under the heading “Works Cited”, alphabetised by the first author’s surname (or the title when there is no author). Each entry takes a hanging indent — the first line flush left, every line after it indented.

Works Cited
  • 1.Carrington, Damian. “World Leaders Strike Landmark Climate Deal at COP26.” The Guardian, 13 Nov. 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/13/cop26-climate-deal.
  • 2.Cherry, Kendra. “How Human Memory Works.” Verywell Mind, 10 June 2022, https://www.verywellmind.com/how-memory-works-2795000. Accessed 15 Jan. 2024.
  • 3.Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed., University of Chicago Press, 1996.
  • 4.Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson. “Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory.” Psychological Review, vol. 80, no. 5, 1973, pp. 352-73, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0020071.
MLA 9th edition
This generator uses MLA 9th edition (2021). The 9th edition keeps the “core elements” template introduced in the 8th — Author, Title of Source, Title of Container, Other Contributors, Version, Number, Publisher, Publication Date, Location — so a single sequence builds every source type rather than a separate template per type. It adds clearer guidance on quoting versus italicising titles, listing other contributors (“edited by …”), and recording an optional access date for online sources.

MLA Citation Generator — questions

Which MLA edition does this generator use?+

It follows MLA 9th edition (published 2021), the current standard for almost every course that uses MLA. The 9th edition keeps the “core elements” template introduced in the 8th — Author, Title of Source, Title of Container, Other Contributors, Version, Number, Publisher, Publication Date, Location — and adds clearer guidance on quoting titles, listing contributors and recording the date you accessed an online source.

What is the difference between the title and the container in MLA?+

The title of the source is the specific thing you read — an article, a chapter, a web page — and it goes in double quotation marks. The container is the larger work that holds it — a journal, an anthology, a website — and it is italicised. A whole book or film is its own source, so its title is italicised with nothing in quotation marks.

How do I write an MLA in-text citation?+

Put the author’s surname and the page number in round brackets with no comma and no “p.” between them, for example (Kuhn 23). If you name the author in your sentence, give only the page number in brackets. For three or more authors, use the first surname followed by “et al.” (Vaswani et al. 5998). Use this tool’s in-text preview, then add the page you are quoting.

When do I use “et al.” in MLA?+

Use “et al.” for a source with three or more authors, in both the Works Cited entry and every in-text citation. In the Works Cited list you give the first author inverted, then “et al.” — for example, “Vaswani, Ashish, et al.” A source with one or two authors lists every name in full.

How do I cite a source with no author in MLA?+

Begin the Works Cited entry with the title and alphabetise by the first significant word of that title (ignoring A, An or The). In text, use a shortened form of the title in the author position — in quotation marks for an article or web page, italicised for a book or film.

Do I need to include the date I accessed a website?+

MLA treats the access date as optional but recommends it for online sources that can change or that carry no publication date, since it shows which version you used. When you supply one, this tool adds it at the end of the entry as “Accessed 15 Jan. 2024.”

Should MLA titles be capitalised in title case?+

Yes. MLA uses title case for both source titles and container titles: capitalise the first and last words and all principal words, and lowercase articles, coordinating conjunctions and short prepositions unless they begin or end the title. This generator applies title case to each title field automatically.

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