ISBN to MLA Converter
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Paste an ISBN and get the MLA 9 works cited entry for the book, with its in-text citation. ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 both work, hyphens optional. The record comes from OpenLibrary, with Google Books when OpenLibrary has none.
How to convert an ISBN to MLA
Step 1
Find the ISBN
on the back cover above the barcode, or on the copyright page.
Step 2
Paste and convert
One per line, up to 50. Single citation gives the works cited entry; Reference list gives a sorted Works Cited list; In-text citation gives (Kahneman 45).
Step 3
Check, then copy
Compare the authors and year with your copy's title page, then copy into Word or Google Docs.
A real lookup, and what to check
ISBN 9780141033570 returns:
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Penguin, 2012.
That is the MLA 9 book format: author, title in italics and title case, publisher, year. No city: MLA dropped the place of publication. The year is the year of this Penguin paperback; cite the edition you actually read.
Book records are kept by libraries and volunteers, so check them. ISBN 9780262035613 returns Deep Learning with Francis Bach as a fourth author and the year 2017, the date that record gives. Bach edits the MIT Press series the book belongs to, and the book came out in 2016, so the entry becomes "Goodfellow, Ian, et al. Deep Learning. MIT Press, 2016."
Citing a chapter in an edited book
An ISBN gives you the book. For one chapter, the chapter becomes the source and the book becomes its container. Add four things the ISBN cannot supply: the chapter's author, its title in quotation marks, the editors, and the chapter's pages.
Rumelhart, David E., et al. “Learning Representations by Back-Propagating Errors.” Neurocomputing: Foundations of Research, edited by James A. Anderson and Edward Rosenfeld, MIT Press, 1988, pp. 696–99.
The publisher and year carry over from the book entry unchanged.
Frequently asked questions
Author. Title. Publisher, year. With two authors: "Jordan, M. I., and T. M. Mitchell." With three or more: the first author and et al.
No. MLA dropped it in the 8th edition. An entry that reads "London: Penguin" was made with an older template.
Each edition has its own ISBN, so check the one printed in your copy. If the record is still wrong, correct the year or the author by hand; title and publisher are usually right.
Like the print book. If you read it in a database or on a site, MLA adds that as a second container with its URL or DOI.
Yes, use the ISBN to BibTeX converter for a @book entry.
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