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MLA 9 citation generator
Paste a DOI, ISBN or link and get a works cited entry in MLA 9th edition, with the fields shown so you can check them.
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What a reference in MLA 9 looks like
The shape is always the same: who, when, what, where. Once you can see it, you can check any reference a generator gives you, including this one.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Author. "Title of Article." Journal Name, vol. Volume, no. Issue, Year, pp. pages.
Aspelmeyer, Markus. "Measured Measurement." Nature Physics, vol. 5, no. 1, 2009, pp. 11-12.
BOOK
Author. Title of Book. Publisher, Year.
Dahl, Roald. Matilda. Jonathan Cape, 1988.
WEB PAGE
Author. "Title of Page." Site Name, Day Month Year, URL.
"Air Quality and Health." World Health Organization, 7 Mar. 2024, www.who.int/.
Three things MLA 9 asks for that people get wrong
It is a list of containers, not a list of types
MLA 9 does not ask you to pick a template per source type. It asks for nine core elements in a fixed order, and anything that holds the work is a container. An article sits in a journal; the journal may sit in a database. That is why one pattern covers a form MLA has never seen before.
Three authors or more is et al.
Two authors are both named, the first inverted and the second not. Three or more become the first author followed by et al.
URLs lose their protocol
MLA drops http:// and https:// from a displayed URL. A DOI is preferred over a URL when one exists, and is written as https://doi.org/ in full.
An in-text citation starts where the entry starts
It opens with whatever comes first in the works cited entry: usually the author's family name, or the title when there is no author. That is what lets a reader find the entry in an alphabetised list.
Name the author once
If the author is already in your sentence, the brackets carry only the page: According to Naomi Baron, reading is 'just half of literacy' (194). Giving the name in the sentence and again in the brackets is the error the MLA itself singles out.
A shortened title takes no ellipsis
When a long title stands in for a missing author, cut it to its opening words and leave it there. The MLA's editors confirm that no ellipsis is used.
Need a different style?
Questions
What is the difference between MLA 8 and MLA 9?
MLA 9, published in 2021, keeps the container system MLA 8 introduced and adds guidance rather than changing the core pattern. Entries written correctly for MLA 8 are usually still correct.
Do I need to include the date I accessed a page?
Only when the source has no date of its own, or is likely to change. MLA treats it as optional supplementary information.
How do I cite a source with no author?
Start with the title, in quotation marks for a short work and in italics for a long one, and alphabetise the entry by the first significant word.
THE ANDROID APP
Keep them, export them, and check your draft
CiteRight for Android writes MLA 9 and other supported styles, keeps your references in projects, exports a bibliography, and checks a draft sentence by sentence for text that overlaps a source.