by K. Macdissi
Your teacher has assigned a research paper. You’ve chosen a topic, refined the thesis statement that will guide your research, and now you are reading, taking notes, writing your first draft. Then your teacher reminds the class to make sure every source used has its entry on the Works Cited page, using the MLA format. You break out in a cold sweat, but remember the Writing Center Underground has some how-to help on this very topic! And here you are. Let’s break it down bird by bird, as Anne Lamott would say.
The Elements
A Works Cited entry in Modern Languages Association format consists of nine basic elements. Not every element may be present for every entry, but every element should be considered and included, if present and relevant to your paper. The idea is to make it as easy as possible for your reader to find the sources you used. With that in mind, here are the basic elements:
1. Author.
2. Title.
3. Title of the Container, (The website where an article is housed, for example. More about containers below.)
4. Contributor, (this could be an editor, or a director, if citing a movie—the idea is that they contributed significantly to the overall work that you are using)
5. Version,
6. Number,
7. Publisher,
8. Publication date,
9. Location.
Punctuation Between Elements
Notice that elements 1,2 and 9 will be followed by a period. The other elements will be followed by a comma.
A Look at Each Element
Author: Finding the author of a web article can be tricky. If the author’s name is not under the title of the article (as you would expect), scroll down to the very end of the article as well. Often you will find it there. Sometimes there truly is no author attributed, in which case skip this element and move on to the title. Occasionally, the author may be an organization or corporation, but if the corporate “author” is the same as the publisher, skip the author and move on to title.
Format for single author: Last name, First Name. Ex. Lamott, Anne.
Two authors: Last name, First Name and First Name, Last Name. Ex. Campbell, Joseph and Edith Hamilton.
Three or more authors: Last Name, First Name, et. al. Ex. Frazier, James, et. al.
Corporate Author: Name of the corporation or government entity.
Ex. Modern Language Association of America.
Title of Source: Use the entire title, capitalizing the major words. A shorter work (those often “contained” in larger works) such as a short story, article, poem or song goes in quotation marks.
Title of an article on a website: “Finding Your Zen.”
Title of an entire website: Zen Institute.
Title of a book: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Title of an article in a journal: “What Exactly Does Our Robot Future Look Like?”
Title of a journal: Journal of the American Medical Association.
Title of Container: Most sources will be housed or contained within another, larger source, or “container.” The website article is contained within the website. The journal article is contained within the journal. A short story or an essay might be contained within a book (often an anthology). A movie might be contained within a streaming service, like Netflix or Hulu. Starting to get the idea? These larger containers will be italicized, and followed by a comma since there is usually descriptive information added such as an editor, volume number, or date.
First containers: Anthologies or collections, magazines and newspapers, scholarly journals, TV series, websites.
Second containers: Yes, there can be more than one container. An article might be contained in a journal, which in turn is contained in a database, for example. These second containers will also be italicized.
Ex. “Little Red Riding Hood.” The Blue Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, Longmans, 1889. Project Gutenberg.
Contributors: These are people other than the author that have contributed to the work in some significant way. Editors, translators and directors are frequently mentioned in this category, but depending on your medium and/or your research topic, you might need to cite illustrators, narrators or performers as well. Precede the name (or names) of contributors with a description of the role.
Ex: Goodfellas, directed by Martin Scorcese
Version: If there is any indication that the source is available in different versions, identify the version you are using.
Ex. The Bible. New International Version, Cambridge UP, 2003.
Number: If your source is one volume in a numbered series, indicate that fact. Journals are also typically numbered, with all the issues of one year comprising a volume. The volumes are sequential, while the issues start with “1” for each year.
Ex. Jones, Jane. “Why We Write: Engaging in Text Response as a Subversive Act.” College Writing, vol. 22, no. 3, Oct. 2017, pp 45-47.
Not every journal uses “volume” as an organizing principle. Some just list issues sequentially.
Ex. “Blogging Toward Bliss.” Namaste, no. 77, 2015, pp. 23-24.
Publisher: This is the entity responsible for getting your source out into the world. It might be a traditional publishing company like Simon and Schuster or St. Martin’s Press. It can also be an organization like The National Council of Teachers of English. If you are citing a film, the publisher could be Twentieth Century Fox. The publisher’s name is written in normal text, neither italicized nor enclosed in quotations. A publisher is usually not given for journals and periodicals, nor for websites whose title is essentially the same as the publisher. Likewise, if something is self-published by the author, no publisher name is required.
Date of Publication: For a book or periodical, the date is pretty straightforward—usually found on the copyright page for books, or on the cover for periodicals. Many online articles are also clearly dated. However, online articles may also have been published previously in another medium. In this case, use the date most relevant to your research. If you used the web article, use the web date. Also use as much date information as you have. If the article has a month and day, use them in your citation, but don’t forget that in MLA, the day comes before the month.
Ex. 14 July 2013.
Location: For print sources, use page numbers to indicate the location of the material you used for your paper, preceded by p. for a single page, or pp. for multiple pages. Ex. p. 3 or pp. 25-28.
Use the URL for online articles, omitting the http:// tag at the beginning of the URL. Ex. u.osu.edu/pollinators101.
If your source has a DOI (digital object identifier) use that in place of the URL. DOIs are stable and will remain the same even if the URL changes.
And that’s it. You have all the pieces of information necessary to write an entry for Works Cited in MLA style. Not every entry will use every element, but here is an example of an entry that uses most of the elements.
Evans, Christine. “Artemis vs. Athena: Feminine Role Models in Myth and Legend.” Salamander, vol. 10, no. 4, May 2005. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/866704.
Now you can give due credit to all the sources and writers who have informed your research paper and give your readers the information they would need to find those sources. Happy writing!
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