ISBN to MLA Converter
Free. No signup. Runs in your browser.
Paste an ISBN and get an MLA 9 works cited entry for the book. The lookup goes to OpenLibrary, with Google Books as a fallback when OpenLibrary has no record. ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 both work, hyphens optional.
How to convert an ISBN to MLA
The ISBN sits near the barcode on the back cover and on the copyright page. Paste it in any form:
9780262035613
0-262-03561-8
and you get:
Zhang, Wei. A Book about Things. Example Press, 2019.
Title case, book title in italics, publisher then year. MLA 9 does not want the publisher’s city, which older MLA editions did, so an entry that reads “London: Example Press” came from a pre-MLA-8 template.
For several books, paste one ISBN per line. For a full works cited page with everything sorted and the hanging indent applied, use the MLA works cited generator, which takes the same input.
Citing a chapter rather than the whole book
This is where an mla book citation generator can only get you part of the way, and it is worth understanding before you paste.
An ISBN identifies the whole book. If you are citing a chapter in an edited collection, which is the common case in coursework, MLA wants the chapter as the source and the book as its container. That means four things the ISBN lookup cannot supply: the chapter title, the chapter’s author, the editor of the volume, and the page range of the chapter.
Take the book entry this tool gives you and rework it:
Abe, Kenji. "A Chapter about Something." The Big Book of Things, edited by Wei Zhang, Example Press, 2021, pp. 12-40.
The chapter author moves to the front, the chapter title goes in quotation marks, the book title stays italic and becomes the container, and the editor is named after it. The publisher and year carry over unchanged from what the lookup gave you, so it is still doing half the work.
If you are citing the book as a whole, none of this applies and the generated entry is complete.
Frequently asked questions
Book metadata comes from OpenLibrary, which is crowd-maintained, rather than from a publisher deposit like a DOI. Editions get conflated and author names are sometimes stored as one string rather than as given and family names. Check the edition and the author against the title page of your actual copy and correct by hand. Title, year, and publisher are usually right.
Yes, the ISBN to BibTeX converter takes the same input and returns a @book entry for your .bib file.
You Have a Word or PDF File. We'll Convert it to Submission-Ready LaTeX.
We convert Word documents and PDFs into clean, submission-ready LaTeX for IEEE, Springer, Elsevier, ACM, arXiv, and more. Equations, tables, citations, and journal templates included. Compiled and tested in Overleaf before delivery.
Reviewed by a real LaTeX specialist.