MLA in-text Citation

work with more than one author exp.

(Levine and Parks 2). or Elana Levine and Lisa Parks assert that "Buffy the Vampire Slayer dramatizes the travails of its title character but uses its metaphorical representations of life and death, good and evil, comedy and tragedy to speak about the power struggles inherent in many people's everyday lives in the Western world" (2).

In this example, page 236 in volume 3 of a work by Trieste is cited:

(Trieste 3: 236)

For example, if you were citing a study by the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes

According to the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes, in percent of charter schools, students had math scores that were lower than their public school peers (3).

Citing a website with no author

Depending on the content, credible websites do not always include authors. Ex. "Website Article." Website Title. Website Publisher, Date Month Year Published. Web. Date Month Year Accessed.

For example, let's say you were reading a book titled Literary Theory by Terry Eagleton that included a quotation by Sigmund Freud. If you wanted to use Freud's quotation in your essay, you would cite it

Even Freud acknowledged the central importance of economics in human relations, famously stating, "The motive of human society is in the last resort an economic one" (qtd. in Eagleton 151). Your Works Cited list will contain an entry for Eagleton's book but not Freud's original text.

if you were quoting from two different books by Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope and Letters to Cristina, your parenthetical citations might look like

Freire emphasizes the crucial role of hope in the struggle for change. Acknowledging that hope "seldom exists apart from the reverses of fate" (Letters 14), Freire argues that the "dream of humanization . . . is always a process" (Pedagogy 99).

Work without an author listed

If you cite a work without an author listed, include a brief version of the title in parentheses.

Work in more than one volume

If you use more than one volume from a multivolume work in your paper, indicate the volume and page number in each citation. The volume number is followed by a colon. If you cite only one volume, however, you can provide the page number only. In your Works Cited entry, list the volume number.

online sources, such as websites, often do not have page numbers. In such cases

In such cases, if possible provide the number of the paragraph in which you found the information or quotation you are citing: (Martinez, par. 8)

work cited from a web site

Last, First M. "Article Title."Website Title. Website Publisher, Date Month Year Published. Web. Date Month Year Accessed.

Work in an anthology

Name the author of the particular work, not the editor of the entire anthology, in your citation. The entry in your Works Cited list would include the editors' names.

if you were citing a story by Nathan Englander that appears in the anthology The Best American Short Stories 2012, edited by Tom Perrotta and Heidi Pitlor, you would not need to mention the editors of the anthology:

Nathan Englander plays off Raymond Carver's famous story title in his short work "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank."

if you were citing information from page 79 of a journal article titled "Empirical Foundations for Writing in Prevention and Psychotherapy," by Brian A. Esterling, Luciano L'Abate, Edward J. Murray, and James W. Pennebaker, the parenthetical citation would look like

Studies have shown that writing has therapeutic benefits for some patients (Esterling et al. 79).

if you cited information from page 27 of an article from The Economist titled "Carrying the Torch," you would do so

The sports management industry in Great Britain received a significant boost in business as a result of the 2012 Olympic Games in London ("Carrying" 27).

Long quotations

These quotations should be indented one inch from the left as a block quotation—without quotation marks. The entire block should be double-spaced, and no additional space should be used above or below the block quotation. The page number for the quotation is included in parentheses at the end of the block quotation. the parenthetical citation is placed after the final period of the block quotation. If the author's name does not appear in the main text, include it in the parentheses.

Electronic sources

When citing electronic sources, follow the same principles you would use when citing other sources

When you refer to an entire work

include only the author's name, either in your sentence or in parentheses. No page numbers are needed.

If you are referring to a work by more than three authors

list only the first author's name followed by the Latin phrase et al. (which means "and others"). there is no comma after the name of the author.

When citing a work parenthetically

the author's last name is followed by a page number or range of pages.

When using a quotation from one source that you have found in another source

use the abbreviation qtd. in (for "quoted in") to indicate that you are taking the quotation from a second source rather than from the original text.

When citing a corporate author

use the same format as for a single author

D. More than one work by the same author

you need to distinguish among the works by using a shortened form of the title of each work you cite