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Citation Help

A guide on citation styles and formatting

MLA Style Introduction

MLA style is most commonly used within the Humanities. This guide includes guidance for the 8th format on:

  • End-of-text citation formatting for your "Works Cited" page
  • In-text citations, when you include a direct quotation, paraphrase or summarize someone else's work within the body of your paper
  • General formatting for your MLA style paper including: margins, line spacing, page numbers, title page, headers and reference page

MLA Format

General formatting requirements: 

  • Double-space
  • MLA recommends 12 point size Times New Roman font
  • 1-inch margins
  • Indent the first line of each paragraph
  • Include a header with page numbers in the upper right-hand corner
  • Include a centered title on your reference page: "Works Cited"
  • Begin your Works Cited page on a separate page at the end of your research paper.
  • Indent the second and subsequent lines of citations to create a hanging indent
  • If you're citing an article or a publication that was originally issued in print form but that you retrieved from an online database, include the online database name in italics.

MLA Citation formats for all article types here.

Template

Author Last Name, Author First Name. "Title of Article." Title of Journal,  vol. Volume, no. Issue, Year of             Publication, pp. Page Range. URL or DOI.

Example

Duvall, John N. "The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation          in DeLillo's White Noise." Arizona Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 3, 1994, pp. 127-53. doi:10.1353/mfs.1997.0056.

MLA Citation guide for books is here.

Template

Last Name, First Name. Title of Book. City of Publication, Publisher, Publication Year.

Example

​Henley, Patricia. The Hummingbird House. MacMurray, 1999.

Example E-book

Silva, Paul J. How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing. E-book, American Psychological Association, 2007.

MLA guide for citing electronic resources can be found here.

Website Magazine/Newspaper Template

Author Last Name, Author First Name. "Title of Article.". Title of website publication. Publication Date, URL. Accessed Date.

Webpage Example

Bernstein, Mark. “10 Tips on Writing the Living Web.” A List Apart: For People Who Make Websites, 16 Aug. 2002, alistapart.com/article/writeliving. Accessed 4 May 2009, 

In-Text Citations

Any time a source is directly quoted or paraphrased should be cited within your paper. More examples of in-text citations can be found here.

  • Provide a parenthetical citation, parentheses that includes relevant information such as a page number
  • Any source information that you provide in-text must correspond to a citation on the Works Cited page
  • The author's name may appear either in the sentence itself or in parentheses following the quotation or paraphrase, but the page number(s) should always appear in the parentheses

In-text citations for print sources with an author examples:

  • Author included in sentence: Human beings have been described by Kenneth Burke as "symbol-using animals" (3). 
  • Author not included: Human beings have been described as "symbol-using animals" (Burke 3).

In-text citations for print sources by a corporate/organization author example:

  • We see so many global warming hotspots in North America likely because this region has "more readily accessible climatic data and more comprehensive programs to monitor and study environmental change . . ." ("Impact of Global Warming").

MLA Resources

When to Cite

Cite sources to document all facts that you mention that are not common knowledge.

Cite when you are directly quoting 

If you are stating word-for-word what someone else has already written, you must put quotes around those words and give credit to the original author. 

Cite when you are summarizing and paraphrasing

Summarizing and paraphrasing are two related practices but they are not the same.

  • Summarizing is when you read a text, consider the main points, and provide a shorter version of what you learned 
  • Paraphrasing is when you restate what the original author said in your own words, adapting it to your style and the context of your topic